Why Isn't 'Shot in the Dark' on Ozzy Osbourne's Greatest Hits Albums?

Despite the fact that it was his first solo song to hit the pop charts, Ozzy Osbourne's "Shot in the Dark" has not been included on any "best-of" compilations in nearly 30 years.

Released in February 1986 as the lead single from Osbourne's fourth solo album The Ultimate Sin, "Shot in the Dark" reached No. 68 on the Billboard 100. Only four of his songs have ever reached higher, most notably the Top 10 smash "Close My Eyes Forever," a 1989 duet with Lita Ford.

But the song has been notably left off all of the career-spanning collections Osbourne released since 1998: 2003's The Essential Ozzy Osbourne, 2005's Prince of Darkness and 2014's Memoirs of a Madman.

"Shot in the Dark" did appear on the original release of 1997's The Ozzman Cometh, but when that compilation was re-released in 2002, it was replaced by 1988's "Miracle Man."

According to setlist.fm, Osbourne only performed the song live three times between 1993 and 2009, before it returned for the 2010-2011 Scream world tour. The song's official video is also oddly absent from the heavy metal legend's otherwise voluminous YouTube page.

Part of the problem may be that Osbourne just plain doesn't like The Ultimate Sin album as a whole. "To me, it's hands down the worst album I ever made," he said in his 2025 book Last Rites, laying much of the blame on producer Ron Nevison. "Every track had that same late-eighties treatment - it needed more imagination."

Perhaps as a result, The Ultimate Sin has been left out of several Osbourne catalog remastering and reissue campaigns. The album is effectively out of print on CD and LP, with used vinyl copies selling for anywhere from $60 to $100 on eBay as of February 2026.

Osbourne's lack of love for the album could also be attributed to the fact that he wasn't involved in the early stages of its creation. Guitarist Jake E. Lee and bassist Bob Daisley started songwriting for The Ultimate Sin on their own while Osbourne was in rehab for alcohol abuse.

The two both reported having to fight difficult battles to get proper songwriting credits for the album. As a result of these disagreements, Daisley left the band before recording his bass parts, leading Osbourne to hire Phil Soussan in his place.

That's where "Shot in the Dark" enters the story When asked if he had any potential songs to contribute to The Ultimate Sin, Soussan delivered a demo version of the still-unreleased track, which he had originally written for his previous band, Wildlife. (You can hear a snippet of their version of the song here.)

"We never released it," Soussan told Face Culture in 2024. "And then when we [broke up], I presented the song to three or four projects afterwards. It wasn’t until Ozzy heard it and said, ‘Oh, let’s do it' [that it got released.] So it’s funny, a song sits in a drawer for a long time… and then one day somebody relates to it."

Watch Ozzy Osbourne Perform 'Shot in the Dark'

As noted above, Osbourne's version of "Shot in the Dark" was a huge hit, reaching heavy rotation and MTV and helping push The Ultimate Sin to double-platinum sales status.

Soussan left Osbourne's band in 1988 after completing the Ultimate Sin tour. There has been speculation that a dispute over the publishing rights and payments for the song may be the reason "Shot in the Dark" has been left off from Osbourne's various compilations.

While Soussan admits that the inability to obtain "the deal that I wanted" in terms of future songwriting rights and payments was the reason he left Osbourne's group, he insists that everything's "just been fine" between the two sides in regards to past agreements, apart from a brief dust-up about late payments in the early '90s.

"I was asked to join a lawsuit that Bob Daisley had, but I never joined that lawsuit; I didn't have anything to sue anybody about," Soussan told the Five Count in 2021. "I think Bob and [former Osbourne drummer] Lee [Kerslake] had some issues that were going on, but when they called me, I just said the same thing I just said to you. I said, 'Why would I wanna do this?' So that was it. But all of a sudden, you hear these stories that we were in court. We never went to court. I never sued anybody."

See how we ranked Ozzy's solo album from worst to best below.