I was born in the Midlands and lived in Birmingham for five years so I’ve always had a soft spot for local heroes Black Sabbath.
I saw them once at Birmingham Odeon in the mid 1970s around the time of the Sabbath Bloody Sabbath album and remember balancing on the back of a seat flashing the peace sign back at Ozzy Osborne for almost the whole show – the closest I’ve ever come to being a headbanger.
It was, along with Hawkwind at the same venue, one of the loudest concerts I’ve experienced and it took me two days for my hearing to get back to normal.
For this reason, I couldn’t resist watching a one-hour BBC Classic Album documentary about the making of Paranoid in 1970.
It was both highly entertaining and a case study in how to demystify of the record making process. Sabbath have never claimed to be sophisticated or innovative but almost by accident stumbled upon a winning formula that became a blueprint for metalheads everywhere.
Tony Iommi conjured up riffs to order and out of Ozzy Osborne’s stream of semi-consciousness (“I sing any old shit”) bassist Geezer Butler crafted some more coherent lyrics. Geezer also used ideas from sci-fi books by Dennis Wheatley and some half-hearted research into occultism.
Geezer says that the name (and track title) Black Sabbath came in part out of reading about “astral plains and all that cobblers”.
A track like War Pigs may not be Dylan but , as Henry Rollins asked: what is not true about lines like these: “Politicians hide themselves away / They only started the war / Why should they go out and fight? They leave that role to the poor”?
The album was the work of four down-to-earth working class Brummies who were just happy to get a record recorded with no grand ambitions beyond getting extra beer money . Ozzy, used his first royalty cheque to get pissed and buy a pair of shoes.
It took just three days to complete – two days in the recording studio and one day mixing. The casual way the record came together is epitomised by the fact that the title track (which became their calling card) was recorded almost as an afterthought. Iommi came back from the pub with the riff in his head, Geezer tagged on some words about depression (from personal experience) and the track was recorded in less than half an hour.
Paranoid, in common with the rest of their discography was dismissed by the chattering classes but that didn’t stop it from being a massive hit in both Europe and the States. The moral of the tale is a timeless one – fuck the critics, just play what you believe!
