At the 68th Annual Grammy Awards, held Feb. 1 in Los Angeles, guitar god Nuno Bettencourt was in a fantastic mood as he spoke with me (and other remote reporters from around the globe) at the Recording Academy’s Virtual Red Carpet press box. And that was before he even won his very first Grammy, for his work on Yungblud’s “Changes (Live from Villa Park),” which took home the prize for Best Rock Performance.
Bettencourt had only been nominated one other time, at the 1991 Grammys for Extreme’s “More Than Words.” But this was an especially important honor, as Yungblud’s performance was taped at Ozzy Osbourne’s Back to the Beginning all-star tribute concert in Birmingham, England — where the Prince of Darkness sang live for the very last time, just 17 days before his death.
Yungblud’s Back to the Beginning performance — which included not just Bettencourt, but also fellow 2026 Grammy-winners Frank Bello (Anthrax, Helmet, Satyricon), Sleep Token drummer II, and Osbourne keyboardist/rhythm guitarist Adam Wakeman — was the breakout moment of the July 5 event. The fact that it was an unbilled appearance, that its arrangement was switched at the last minute, and that it was the only official single to be released from that concert, made the Recording Academy’s acknowledgement all the more special and meaningful.
“It was something that was crazy, because the night before we actually performed it, we didn’t really have an arrangement for it,” Bettencourt revealed. “The original was just piano and vocal, and I was like, ‘Why don’t we make this the “Purple Rain” version of this song? Let’s make it like emotional, and we include the band rocking.’ And we didn’t know it was going to touch people the way it did.”
While Yungblud has certainly had his share of haters, who’ve wrongly dismissed as some sort of pop-punk poser, the British rocker radically reinvented himself last year with his Idols opus, which also scored nominations for Best Rock Song (for “Zombie”) and Best Rock Album. However, it was his surprise Ozzy tribute in Birmingham that finally silenced many rockist doubters.
“He obviously came from the pop world initially, but I think he’s that kid that’s kind of like, when you’re around him, you feel the rock ‘b’ roll in him,” said Bettencourt. “And with the vocal performance he had that night on that song, I think changed his career — because the emotionality of it, it was touching, and it was magic.”
When I mentioned that what Queen was to Live Aid, Yungblud’s performance was to Back to the Beginning, Bettencourt marveled, “It’s incredible that you said that, because the text that we got when we got offstage was from a Queen member. It was from Brian May, who was in a box, and he said, ‘That performance really touched me.’”
As for Osbourne’s feedback and Bettencourt’s memories of that historic night, the guitarist said with a chuckle, “Well, the crazy thing is, back in the 1900s as a kid, when Randy Rhodes was still in the band and before he passed away in that accident, after he passed away, there was an ad in Circus magazine that Ozzy’s looking for a new guitar player. I think I was about 14 or 15. I’m like, ‘This is my gig! I’m getting this gig!’ So, I borrowed gear from my friends, played two Ozzy songs, sent it in. Every day after school, I was asking my mom, ‘Dd they call? Did they call?’ And I’m like, ‘No, really? They didn’t call me?’ So, then of course, Jake Lee got it. Ten years later, Ozzy reached out to my booking agent and said, ‘There is a jet waiting for Nuno at Heathrow. He’s got the gig.’ And as he’s telling me this, the only thing I could say is, ‘They heard the cassette!’ … To me, he’d finally heard it.
“And the last words that Ozzy said to me, when we were taking that photo [at Back to the Beginning last year], is he grabbed my wrist really hard and he said, ‘You are the only beep that said no to me. I think that’s pretty special.’ So, that’s the last thing he said,” Bettencourt added a bit more somberly. ‘We didn’t know we were going to lose him after that.”
Another way in which Bettencourt’s Birmingham experience was a full-circle career moment was — as a remote journalist from Music for Music People pointed out — Prince, whose “Purple Rain” inspired that day’s “Changes” arrangement, once declared Bettencourt one of the three greatest guitarists of all time.
“I am still in therapy because of it. I’m still in therapy, because he’s one of my idols, if not the top,” Bettencourt joked. “And yes, when he came to see me perform live and said that to one of my best friends after the show, they were messing with me: ‘We’re not going to tell you what he said!’ And that meant the world to me, because I have so much influence in the funk part of what Extreme is and everything that we did. And yes, this [Grammy] partly has to go to [Prince], because those are the words that came out of my mouth at rehearsal: “Let’s do the “Purple Rain” version of “Changes.”’ And that’s what it was. And I believe that that’s why it was as emotional as it was, as ‘Purple Rain’ was. We all cried. It’s one of my favorite songs of all time.”
As Bettencourt headed back the Premiere Ceremony learn the results of the Best Rock Performance category (which included worthy nominees Amyl and the Sniffers, Linkin Park, Turnstile, and Hayley Williams), Bettencourt already felt like a winner.
“[Osbourne] attended his own life celebration, his own funeral, his own everything. What a legend,” he gushed. “To me, the win was already that day. Whether we win or not [tonight], it’s beautiful thing to be here.”
The Instagram interview video above is courtesy of the Recording Academy.
