{"id":431763,"date":"2026-05-17T08:41:13","date_gmt":"2026-05-17T08:41:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/431763\/"},"modified":"2026-05-17T08:41:13","modified_gmt":"2026-05-17T08:41:13","slug":"the-story-behind-black-sabbaths-second-album-paranoid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/431763\/","title":{"rendered":"The story behind Black Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid"},"content":{"rendered":"

Summer 1970, and paranoia is in the air. In less than a year, Woodstock<\/a>\u2019s vision of a kinder society has turned to ashes. The carnations placed in rifle barrels by Vietnam protesters have not slowed the shipment of body bags. The Cold War\u2019s adversaries edge closer to their nuclear buttons. Meanwhile, amid the craters, rubble and roaming gangs of Birmingham\u2019s Blitz-scarred Aston, the members of Black Sabbath<\/a> are feeling the spirit of the age.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was scared stiff that we\u2019d be dragged into Vietnam, and World War III seemed a very real event,\u201d Sabbath\u2019s bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler<\/a> says, a half-century later. \u201cI was really into flower power in the sixties. I went to the love-ins at Woburn Abbey in sixty-seven and sixty-eight, with kaftan, beads, and flowers in my hair. But by the time we wrote the Paranoid album reality had set in. A lot of my lyrics were my disappointment that the love era was just a pipe dream. The love-ins and protests were all in vain.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Sabbath had already put a little distance between themselves and reality. Despite the best efforts of a snide rock press and an apathetic record industry, the band\u2019s self-titled debut album had been a transatlantic success, reaching No.8 in the UK and No.23 in the US. But with media daggers drawn and the threat of conscription on the cards \u2013 or, even worse, a return to the abattoirs and welding factories they\u2019d just escaped \u2013 Butler, guitarist Tony Iommi<\/a>, drummer Bill Ward and singer Ozzy Osbourne<\/a> were still running as hard as they could.<\/p>\n

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The genesis of the material that hardened into Sabbath\u2019s thundering second album, Paranoid, is a slippery subject. Ward believes that some songs date back to \u201968. Osbourne talks of reel-to-reel tape recorders spinning for hours at marathon jam sessions, hoovering up countless wisps of gold. Butler recalls the debut album\u2019s live show-stopper, Warning, bleeding into War Pigs at thinly attended early shows.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere would be about three people in the audience,\u201d Iommi told Rolling Stone. \u201cSo we\u2019d just make things up.\u201d<\/p>\n

Origins, perhaps, were less important than originality. \u201cThe first album was signed on the strength of Evil Woman, a cover song, and Warning was a cover song as well,\u201d says Butler.<\/p>\n

\u201cSuccess gave us confidence in our writing. It meant we could go ahead and write all original material for Paranoid. The critics were brutal on our first album, so when it was successful it showed they were way out of touch with what was happening. With Paranoid, we only had ourselves to please. If we liked the songs, that was all we needed.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Working the live circuit across Europe, while snatching days for writing sessions, the band finally came to rest at Rockfield Studios in Wales, where pre-production with trusted producer Rodger Bain literally blew the roof off.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was an old barn where we set up,\u201d Butler recalls, \u201cbut when we started playing, part of the roof fell in because of the volume. We were four kids from Aston, just glad to be living our dream. We still lived in Brum with our parents at the time, so any chance to travel out of the inner city, we gladly took. It was sort of a paid holiday for us \u2013 we were very close, us against the world sort of thing. We loved having a laugh, getting stoned and drunk together.\u201d<\/p>\n

Archive shots of Sabbath larking with air rifles on the riverbank suggest a Boy\u2019s Own adventure, yet Rockfield\u2019s rural idyll was far from the dystopian track-listing now taking form. These were songs that found the band with one eye on darkening global politics, another examining their own mental states, with a healthy stir of sci-fi and the occult. As Iommi told music paper Disc & Music Echo: \u201cWe write about what\u2019s happening in the world. We prick consciences.\u201d<\/p>\n

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Fascinatingly, the just-released Paranoid Super Deluxe box set<\/a> includes an unreleased performance from Montreux, showing how album opener War Pigs might have sounded had it continued with its original title of Walpurgis and Butler\u2019s witchy lyric (\u2018On the hill the church in ruin, is the scene ofevil doings\/It\u2019s a place for all bad sinners, watch them eating dead rats\u2019 innards\u2019).<\/p>\n

In its final form, the song was less schlocky, more thoughtful, with Butler\u2019s second draft attacking the capitalist war machine that sent soldiers to the meat grinder and enriched the politicos, with Iommi stabbing a brutal riff after each line.<\/p>\n

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\"Black\n<\/p>\n

Black Sabbath at Regents Sounds studios, London in June 1970 (Image credit: Chris Walter\/WireImage)<\/p>\n

While War Pigs put the stench of burning bodies into listeners\u2019 nostrils, Hand Of Doom\u2019s bleakly groovy jazz-rock explored battle\u2019s fallout, drawing on the band\u2019s experiences of playing US military bases in England, where soldiers numbed their post-traumatic stress disorder with narcotics.<\/p>\n

\u201cHand Of Doom was about people on drugs and what happens to them, their skin turning green and things,\u201d Osbourne told NME. \u201cThere\u2019s a lot of gory words, but we\u2019ve seen a lot of people like that and it\u2019s getting out of all proportion. If you can frighten people with words, it\u2019s better than letting them find out by trying drugs. [But] I\u2019m not trying to say that we\u2019re angels.\u201d<\/p>\n

Electric Funeral repeated Hand Of Doom\u2019s tempo trick of kicking from a funereal trudge into fifth gear, this time with Iommi working a wah-wah pedal while Osbourne caterwauled about a nuclear holocaust that \u2018turns people into clay\/Radiation minds decay\u2019.<\/p>\n

Positively hippie-ish by comparison, Butler believes the woozy swoon of the \u201cinterplanetary love song\u201d Planet Caravan was the result of a heavy session on the band\u2019s preferred black Afghani hash. But any sniff of benevolence was snuffed out by the closing Fairies Wear Boots, a nod to the night when skinheads hijacked a gig in Weston-superMare and got more than they bargained for.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne grabbed Ozzy around the neck and didn\u2019t realise he had a hammer,\u201d Iommi recalled. \u201cHe threw the hammer back and hit the claw in the guy\u2019s face. It was quite gruesome.\u201d<\/p>\n

When it came to recording at London\u2019s Regent Sound and Island Studios, from June 16, 1970, Bain proved adept at stretching the basic four- and eight-track technology. Not every idea flew \u2013 Iommi recalls two wasted hours chanting \u201cheigh-ho\u201d, from Disney\u2019s Snow White And The Seven Dwarfs. But by cloaking Osbourne\u2019s introductory vocal with a ring modulator effect, Iron Man<\/a> truly sounded like the song\u2019s character: a steel soothsayer scorned for warning humanity of its bleak future.<\/p>\n

\u201cIron Man was the result of a jam,\u201d says Butler. \u201cThe song was based on the story of Jesus Christ \u2013 a hero at one point, then reviled a few months later.\u201d Ward\u2019s Rat Salad was little more than a cut-and-shut of his live drum solos, and Paranoid\u2019s talismanic title track didn\u2019t take much longer, spat out in the final moments of a five-day session, after Bain announced the album\u2019s running-time fell short.<\/p>\n

While Iommi\u2019s deathless riff was pure impulse, Butler didn\u2019t have to look far for his lyric about a man blighted by mental health: the bassist had taken to self-harming after doctors advised him to drink away his depression.<\/p>\n

\u201cI couldn\u2019t understand what was happening to me,\u201d he explains. \u201cSo I wrote the Paranoid lyrics to express what I was going through. I thought the song was too commercial-sounding compared to the rest of the album. Probably why I wrote the \u2018downer\u2019 lyrics. How wrong I was!\u201d<\/p>\n

Decades later Osbourne would complain that \u201cI\u2019ve never been on a stage without singing fucking Paranoid\u201d. Yet without the chain of events set in motion by the single reaching No.4 in the UK, Sabbath might never have ruled the 70s. To capitalise, the album title was swiftly changed from War Pigs to Paranoid, rendering the artwork nonsensical as well as ugly (Butler: \u201cI hated the album sleeve\u201d).<\/p>\n

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\"The\n<\/p>\n

The album artwork for Black Sabbath’s second album, Paranoid, released in 1970 (Image credit: Vertigo | Warner Brothers)<\/p>\n

While the press response to the album was reliably savage, Paranoid made it to No.12 in the US, selling more than four million copies there.<\/p>\n

On home turf, Sabbath\u2019s ascent was even more striking, with Paranoid topping the UK album chart (their only record to do so until 2013\u2019s 13), sending the band members on a triumphant drinking bender, not to mention a spending spree that saw them swanning around the Black Country in newly acquired Rolls-Royces.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was brilliant,\u201d says Butler. \u201cAfter all the criticisms and doubters, our fans showed who the most important people are. We were able to buy cars, move out of our parents\u2019 houses, have some money in the bank.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paranoid\u2019s success came at a price, though. The band were bemused to find their shows infiltrated by teenyboppers who had bought the Paranoid single.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt happened a couple of weeks back at a gig in Portsmouth,\u201d Osbourne grumbled in Disc & Music Echo at the time. \u201cWe opened with Paranoid as usual, and suddenly the place went potty. There were kids rushing down the front, girls screaming and grabbing at us. We don\u2019t need fans like those, but we\u2019ll just have to grin and bear them and they\u2019ll go away.\u201d<\/p>\n

More troubling were the misinterpretations of the album\u2019s intentions, with critics accusing the band of Satanism, advocating drugs and driving listeners to suicide (a situation exacerbated when a nurse killed herself with Paranoid spinning on her record player, even though the band were cleared of blame at an inquest).<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of people have a grudge against us because this black magic thing, but it\u2019s got out of all proportion,\u201d Ozzy told the NME. \u201cI believe in black magic, but I haven\u2019t tried it and I won\u2019t.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the past, Butler has said that such smears \u201cseverely pissed me off\u201d, railing in particular against the mis-hearings of the final line of Paranoid\u2019s, in which Osbourne tells listeners to enjoy \u2013 not end \u2013 their lives. Fifty years later, it seems, his conscience is clear. \u201cI didn\u2019t care how people interpreted the album. The only people I cared about were our true fans. The people who misinterpreted the band didn\u2019t even listen to us. Their interpretations were directly opposite of what the band was about.\u201d<\/p>\n

Cast an eye across the rock\u2019n\u2019roll generations since 1970, however, and it\u2019s clear that all the people who matter were listening hard to Paranoid. The album is rightly considered a stone-cold cornerstone of metal, touching everyone from Van Halen<\/a> (who almost named themselves Rat Salad) to Megadeth<\/a> (who covered the title track) to Pantera<\/a> (who, improbably, took Planet Caravan for a spin).<\/p>\n

As Rob Halford of Judas Priest<\/a> points out in the Super Deluxe sleeve-notes: \u201cParanoid led the world into a new sound and scene.\u201d True, but the record\u2019s influence runs deeper and wider, too, cited by acts as disparate as Foo Fighters<\/a>, Faith No More<\/a> and The Replacements<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cParanoid still stands up today,\u201d says Butler. \u201cBecause it was recorded \u2018raw\u2019; there aren\u2019t any gimmicks or tricks that date the album. There wasn\u2019t much room for double-tracking and multiple takes\u2026 If we\u2019d had longer in the studio, the songs would have suffered from overproduction. I think most heavy bands of today cite Paranoid as a major influence. Iron Man is a fun riff to learn when you get your first guitar. At my granddaughter\u2019s school in California it\u2019s a staple in their music class \u2013 her teacher didn\u2019t believe her when she said her grandpa was in Black Sabbath.\u201d<\/p>\n

Running parallel with that acclaim, of course, is the tragedy that Paranoid remains as grimly relevant as ever. War, mental health, the risk of a beating from far-right skinheads\u2026 The subjects explored across the album\u2019s eight tracks are both of their time and eternally prescient, chiming with any given zeitgeist.<\/p>\n

\u201cSubstitute any Vietnam reference with any current war and the lyrics still stand up,\u201d Butler concludes. \u201cMental health issues are finally being talked about in the media. Electric Funeral still applies as far as pollution and the destruction of Mother Earth is concerned. I think the lyrics to Paranoid are timeless.\u201d<\/p>\n

Originally published in Classic Rock issue 281 (November 2020)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Summer 1970, and paranoia is in the air. In less than a year, Woodstock\u2019s vision of a kinder…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":431764,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[156,157,111,139,69],"class_list":["post-431763","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\/431763","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=431763"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/431763\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/431764"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=431763"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=431763"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=431763"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}