Apparently, there exists a recording of Ozzy Osbourne performing a duet with Madonna.

In 1983, Ozzy Osbourne and Madonna recorded vocals for the same track — but Madonna ultimately chose not to release it.

In an era when artists routinely raid their archives to fill “deluxe editions” of albums with unreleased material—often songs they initially deemed unworthy of release—it’s rare to come across a hidden track that genuinely sparks curiosity. But producer and musician Don Was has one of those buried gems.

Back in 1983, during the recording of Born to Laugh at Tornadoes, the second album by his band Was (Not Was), two unlikely voices were invited to contribute vocals to the song “Shake Your Head.” One was Ozzy Osbourne, then preparing to drop his third solo record, Bark at the Moon. The other was a young session vocalist named Madonna.

“She did a fantastic job,” Was recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone. “But once her voice was on it, it stopped sounding like Was (Not Was) to me.”

When the band revisited Shake Your Head in 1992 for their compilation Hello Dad… I’m in Jail, Ozzy returned to re-record his part—but Madonna declined permission to use her original vocals. To fill the gap, the band turned to actress Kim Basinger, known for her collaboration with Prince on “Scandalous!” and an unreleased solo album from 1990. The updated version went on to become Was (Not Was)’s biggest international success, landing in the UK Top 5. Still, as Was admits, things could have turned out quite differently.

“About eight years later, we realized we had Ozzy and Madonna singing on parallel tracks,” he said. “So we passed it to a remixer—who turned it into an Ozzy and Madonna duet.”

Maybe it’s time for Born to Laugh at Tornadoes to get that long-overdue deluxe reissue.

Elsewhere in the same interview, Was looked back on his first encounter with Osbourne, which happened in 1974 when he was playing bass for Detroit folk artist Ted Lucas. Lucas’s band opened for Black Sabbath at a local gig—a mismatch that quickly turned chaotic.

“There were a bunch of 14-year-olds high on amphetamines, and they definitely weren’t there for folk music,” Was recalled. “You can literally hear bottles breaking as we got pelted from the very first song. We had to cut the set short because the drummer was bleeding so badly. Still, we lasted longer than I remembered—we actually made it through three or four songs.”