(* as part of Black Sabbath )
Chart entered : 29 August 1970
Chart peak : 4 ( 14 on reissue )
Number of hits : 17 ( including 3 as part of Black Sabbath )
Note : Black Sabbath have been stuck on 9 hits since 1992 . If they do manage another before we get to Ozzy's solo debut this post will be re-written to cover the group as a whole.
Ozzy's real first name is John. He was born in Birmingham to a working class family in 1948. He did poorly at school tried out at various manual jobs then spent time in prison for burglary after his father refused to pay his fine. He first hooked up with Geezer Butler in 1967 then Tony Iommi and Bill Ward the following year. After a number of name changes they settled on Black Sabbath after noting a cinema queue for the Boris Karloff film of the same name.
The quartet first played as Black Sabbath in Workington in August 1969. They did a session for John Peel's Top Gear and were signed in November. They released their first single "Evil Woman" a cover of a recent US hit by the band Crow, in January 1970. None of them had made a record before so in that sense they're the first "new" band of the seventies. "Evil Woman" lays down the Sabbath template of granite hard riffing, economical soloing, occult subject matter ( though in this case someone else's ) , a sense of dread and oppression unleavened by much melody and of course Ozzy's diseased wail of a voice. Like Screaming Lord Sutch before him, Ozzy can't sing in the normal sense of the word but he understood that in rock you don't need to be a great singer, you can get away with a theatrical sneer if you're loud enough. It wasn't a hit.
The quickly-recorded debut album "Black Sabbath" came out the following month. It's been widely touted as the first metal album, the blues rock of Cream mutated into something different but as the product of provincial and proletarian outsiders it wasn't well received by the critics at the time. Nevertheless it was a substantial hit on both sides of the Atlantic. I'm not really a fan of their music, preferring to get my doom and gloom from Joy Division at the other end of the decade, and Side Two degenerates into an uninteresting jam but I can see why a significant number of rock fans preferred it to say Atom Heart Mother or Tales from Topographic Oceans. There were certainly plenty of Sabbath fans around while I was growing up , both at school and in the neighbourhood.
"Paranoid" was their next recording and I've covered it before Radioactive .
The roots of der Sabbath have some place in my native Cumbria. Iommi spent some time up our way in his earlier days, I was once told, playing in local bands. I imagine this would have give him the connections for his future outfit to play their first gig in Workington.
ReplyDeleteIn the 70s, West Cumbria was proper heavy metal land, though by my youth this had passed into a love of rave that left me somewhat alienated. Not that metal was ever my thing either!
I also believe two young Salford lads by the names of Bernard Dicken and Peter Hook were big Black Sabbath fans, and I can certainly see some of their influence in the playing of the former in "Unknown Pleasures".