'Live Evil' is the first official live album by English heavy metal band Black Sabbath. The previously released 'Live at Last' was not sanctioned by the band. It features Ronnie James Dio on vocals.
Tony Iommi has said that the decision to release 'Live Evil' was prompted by two factors. The first was the 1980 release of the unsanctioned 'Live at Last' album, and the second was former lead vocalist Ozzy Osbourne's 1982 release of a live album consisting entirely of Black Sabbath songs.
In his autobiography, Iommi confesses that he was "unpleasantly surprised" that Osbourne had included only Sabbath songs and speculates "I think putting out the live album like that was down to Sharon (Osbourne, Ozzy's wife and manager), trying to put the cat among the pigeons." At the time, Sharon was severely at odds with her father Don Arden, who was managing Sabbath and was attempting to steer Osbourne away from his deal with Arden's label, Jet, and on to a new deal with Jet's distribution company, CBS. "We had to give the old man two albums, well, a live album counted as two," she is quoted as saying in Mick Wall's 2013 biography on the band. "I knew he'd go for it because it wouldn't cost anything to make...But Don was expecting something with Randy (Rhoads) on it and I just thought fuck that. I'm not giving him that. He can have something with a load of old Sabbath shit on it."
'Live Evil' hit both the UK Top 30 and the US Top 40 Album charts. AllMusic states that " 'Live Evil' does benefit from a crystal clear, in-your-face sound, and by showcasing even amounts of both Ozzy and Dio material, effectively documents Black Sabbath's renascent tours of the early '80s. Ronnie certainly has the vocal chops, if not the same everyman charm, to handle the Osbourne classics, but his incessant banter between (and during!) songs sometimes verges on the unbearable."
Deluxe and Expanded 2CD edition with bonus material
Tracklisting
CD1:
1. E5150
2. Neon Nights
3. N.I.B.
4. Children of the Sea
5. Voodoo
6. Black Sabbath
7. War Pigs
8. Iron Man
CD2:
9. The Mob Rules
10. Heaven And Hell
11. The Sign of the Southern Cross/Heaven and Hell (Continued)
12. Paranoid
13. Children of the Grave
14. Fluff
