Ozzy Osbourne<\/a>, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler first united, it was under the moniker of \u201cthe Polka Tulk Blues Band\u201d. Together they played a form of hard, faintly folky rock. Although the band rebranded as Earth later in the same year, they still needed a hook: something to make them distinct from the soundscape of the day. Then the horror cinema down the road from their rehearsal space presented it to them.<\/p>\n\u201cOne day I thought that it seemed strange that a lot of people spend so much money to see scary movies,\u201d Ozzy told NYRock in 2002. \u201cNobody really wanted to listen to us, so we decided to play slightly scary music. We liked it and, yeah, that\u2019s how it all got started. That\u2019s the story of Black Sabbath.\u201d<\/p>\n
It\u2019s been woven into folklore that Black Sabbath\u2019s dark, doomy style was also forced into the band and their eponymous song when Tony was 17 years old. At that age, the guitarist was a sheet metal worker and had the tips of his fingers sliced off in a factory accident. Doctors said he\u2019d never play again, but he fashioned himself makeshift \u2018fingertips\u2019 using the melted-down caps of washing-up liquid bottles. So the story goes, he then had to downtune his guitar strings to reduce the pressure on his sliced-off digits. However, Tony\u2019s since dismissed this as an urban myth.<\/p>\n
\u201cI would have liked to have not chopped the ends of my fingers off,\u201d he told Classic Rock in 2016. \u201cIt became a burden. Some people say it helped me invent the kind of music I play, but I don\u2019t know whether it did.\u201d<\/p>\n
Black Sabbath is in fact played in E-standard, your run-of-the-mill guitar tuning, and instead draws its eeriness from the tritone: an infamously evil-sounding note progression that has been associated with the Devil since the Middle Ages. Geezer\u2019s claimed that the guitar part was inspired not by Satan, though, but classical \u2013 specifically Mars, The Bringer Of War, from the Gustav Holst suite The Planets. Black Sabbath\u2019s tense opening certainly bears a striking resemblance to the movement, where slow, simple notes escalate in intensity.<\/p>\n
Sign up below to get the latest from Metal Hammer, plus exclusive special offers, direct to your inbox!<\/p>\n
The lyrics, however, were definitely drawn from the dark side. \u201cI was getting into, not practising, but reading a lot [about] spiritualism and black magic,\u201d Geezer remembered during the 1999 Sabbath video The Last Supper. \u201cA lot of people were doing it at the time. It was the post-hippie generation, so all the peace and love was going out the window, and spiritualism was coming in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Apparently, Ozzy somehow got his hands on a 16th-century book all about these occult mysteries. When the singer leant it to Geezer, he \u201cgot a really weird vibe off it\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cThat night, I woke up suddenly and there was this black shape at the bottom of my bed,\u201d the bassist continued. \u201cIt just vanished into thin air as I was staring at it. I thought it had to have something to do with this book that Ozzy brought around for me. I leapt out of bed, rushed to the cupboard to throw the book out, and the book was gone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Geezer told Ozzy about the experience the morning after. Three days after that, the singer used it as the core for Black Sabbath\u2019s lyrics. \u201cFigure in black\u2026 is watching me,\u201d they narrate, so slowly as to emulate a moment of heart-stopping terror \u2013 before diving into more than a dash of artistic liberty: \u201cBig black shape, with eyes of fire\u2026 telling people their desire. Satan\u2019s sitting there \u2013 he\u2019s smiling.\u201d<\/p>\n
When the song was finished, the band still officially called Earth christened it Black Sabbath, after a Mario Bava film that had been screened at that cinema down the road from where they practised. The music embodied the dark aura that the Brummie boys were out for so well that, in August 1969, they too became Black Sabbath. So began 48 years and 19 studio albums of heavy metal trailblazing. However, not one of the band\u2019s releases in the half-century that followed could touch the impact, excellence and sheer horror of that very first song.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rain patters down as the wind whistles. Church bells ring, thunder cracks. Then, you\u2019re enveloped in the ominous…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":128144,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-128143","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-music","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128143","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=128143"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/128143\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/128144"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=128143"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=128143"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=128143"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}