Black Sabbath still so hot

Published on October 31, 2010 by The Editor · No Comments

Black Sabbath story

Ed Hart listens to the Black Sabbath story set to music. He’s impressed.

A programme on Black Sabbath sounds like it might be agony. Black Sabbath on BBC 4’s Classic Albums recently was nothing of the sort.

Ozzie Osborne (vocals), Terry “Geezer” Butler (bass), Tony Iommi (lead) and Bill Ward (drums) delivered an enthralling programme full of insight and humour about how the creative process works.

There was no egoistical bollocks, no pretentious shite, no revisionism or posterity edge-trimming, just an accurate appraisal of how one of the world’s leading heavy metal bands did what it did.

When many such programmes are impaled on the egos of those concerned, these four sons of Aston, Birmingham, who worked their way from the slaughter house and the sort of foundries that accounted for the tips of two of Tony Iommi’ s fingers, delivered a musical treat.

They started with a riff. They started with a word. They started with the odd line. They drew on jazz and this and that.

They produced a synthesis of whatever each brought to the band. From War Pig, Paranoid and Iron Man, their collective talents made something enduring and different

When non-combatant USA was heading for California and San Francisco with more Class A drugs and bees than flowers in its bonnet, Sabbath sank beers with off-duty US soldiers in Britain and got an inkling about what Vietnam was really like.

The result, War Pig, expresses a gloomy reality far removed from the safety of home.

The great thing about the programme was the affability of the characters, the randomness and spontaneity of so much of the creative process.

In between the matter-of-fact explanations on the Black Sabbath story from Bill, Geezer and Ozzie on the arbitrariness of it all, Tony Iommi played with a virtuosity that shows that there was more to Sabbath than the last number on the amp.

Black Sabbath, do they rock you? If not, does this writer make you want to revisit your opinion.

Ed Hart, is wowdewow business editor, and also heavy metal aficionado. Explains a lot.