The one thing I’m sad about is that Bill Ward couldn’t make it. That’s where we started, and we ended up in Birmingham. What’s your favourite memory from the final Sabbath tour?
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Now, you buy a book on how to be a rock star, read it and go from there. Before, you could do gigs and get spotted. Maybe because I’m an old-fashioned guy, but everything seems to be moving too fast now.ĭo you think it’s difficult to be a young musician starting now? Do you get involved with it?Ī little bit. Social media is unavoidable for musicians these days. The royalty aspect of making music has gone right down the toilet. ĭo you think streaming has been good or bad for rock music? I’ve been around a lot of people and I’ve just never got it. My wife’s had covid, my daughter’s had it, I never got it. I do some drawings, I write some words, I read a book.
It’s coming out as soon as it’s been mixed.ĭo you think there are still good rock bands coming through? I’ve got Jeff Beck on it, Tony Iommi, Zakk Wylde, Eric Clapton, the guitar player from Pearl Jam. Your most recent album, Ordinary Man, scored eight out of ten in Classic Rock. Some of them weren’t as good, but I’ve never gone into the studio and thought: “Well, I had a good run, I’d better make a bad record.” The way I look at it, if I say a certain album is my greatest album, to me it’s saying that every album before or after it wasn’t as good. We look worse than we are.ĭo you have a favourite album from the ones you’ve made since the turn of the millennium? You know the old saying: you should never judge a book by its cover.
People would see the crowds at Ozzfest and they looked quite wild. What do you think the perception of rock’n’roll was back then? There’s no platform now for new bands to play. So she said fuck them, we’ll do our own thing. Sharon tried to get me on Lollapalooza, and they told her they didn’t think I was relevant any more, that I was a dinosaur. I mean, that was a Sharon department, not me. Henceforth Black Sabbath would forge ahead with a vision that was wholly theirs.Ozzfest really took off in the late 90s. (The British release included another cover, a version of Crow's "Evil Woman" that doesn't quite pack the muscle of the band's originals the American version substituted "Wicked World," which is much preferred by fans.) But even if the seams are still showing on this quickly recorded document, Black Sabbath is nonetheless a revolutionary debut whose distinctive ideas merely await a bit more focus and development. By the end of the murky, meandering, ten-minute cover of the Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation's "Warning," you can already hear him recycling some of the same simple blues licks he used on side one (plus, the word "warn" never even appears in the song, because Ozzy Osbourne misheard the original lyrics). For all his stylistic innovations and strengths as a composer, Iommi isn't a hugely accomplished soloist. Unfortunately, much of side two is given over to loose blues-rock jamming learned through Cream, which plays squarely into the band's limitations. Even if the album ended here, it would still be essential listening. "Black Sabbath," "The Wizard," "Behind the Wall of Sleep," and "N.I.B." evoke visions of evil, paganism, and the occult as filtered through horror films and the writings of J.R.R. Thematically, most of heavy metal's great lyrical obsessions are not only here, they're all crammed onto side one. The standard pentatonic blues scale always added the tritone, or flatted fifth, as the so-called "blues note" Sabbath simply extracted it and came up with one of the simplest yet most definitive heavy metal riffs of all time. Take the legendary album-opening title cut. Sabbath's genius was finding the hidden malevolence in the blues, and then bludgeoning the listener over the head with it. These qualities set the band apart, but they weren't wholly why this debut album transcends its clear roots in blues-rock and psychedelia to become something more. Circumstance certainly played some role in the birth of this musical revolution - the sonic ugliness reflecting the bleak industrial nightmare of Birmingham guitarist Tony Iommi's loss of two fingertips, which required him to play slower and to slacken the strings by tuning his guitar down, thus creating Sabbath's signature style. Yet of these metal pioneers, Sabbath are the only one whose sound today remains instantly recognizable as heavy metal, even after decades of evolution in the genre.
Compatriots like Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin, and Deep Purple were already setting new standards for volume and heaviness in the realms of psychedelia, blues-rock, and prog rock.
Black Sabbath's debut album is the birth of heavy metal as we now know it.
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