(Credits: Paul Williams)
Mon 26 January 2026 17:30, UK
People always credited Queen as being a law unto themselves. And while Brian May is hardly going to stand and argue with them, the truth is he might be ever so inclined to disagree.
That’s not because he’s not immensely proud of his band or trying to play down his own legacy in some bizarre way, but in the sheer notion of being a law unto oneself, there’s a certain element of mistruth. The reality, no matter how anyone paints it, is that the trajectory of not one single person in the world was born out of nothing. That’s especially the case when you’re an artist.
In this sense, May rejects the albeit flattering statement that Queen were true originals, simply because he sees it that everyone has to be inspired by something; no one can form out of complete obsoletion. Except that is for one man. Even the great gods of the scene can’t touch him, not a single other person can lay claim to creating a whole new genre in the way he did. It can only be Tony Iommi.
“It’s very difficult to be truly original in music because we all have to be influenced by something, otherwise we wouldn’t exist,” the guitarist correctly asserted in a recent interview. “But I don’t know where Tony’s stuff came from, man. I really don’t. He starts doing this riffy stuff, and it’s very dark. There’s a point in music where people want to be angry and heavy on guitars.”
In a landscape at the end of the 1960s when, to a certain extent, everything had been rather sunshine and roses, or at the very least psychedelic, Black Sabbath were a band who broiled in not attempting to be killjoys, but bringing a more sinister edge and bite that the masses had been craving, almost like vampires sucking the blood.
There’s no understating how monumental that was. “It’s gluey and dark and deep, and Tony does all this sort of stuff. Tony brought the whole spectrum of what you could do with those low strings of a guitar together into one package. And it was completely original – it took people a long time to admit that Black Sabbath were totally original.”
Whether the band emerged not as Earthside beings but as monsters from the depths of Satanic hell was another matter completely, but the point still stood that the second Black Sabbath hit the scene, a whole new sinister void had opened that people couldn’t help but feel entranced by. Certainly, if you look at the earliest cuts from Queen, who emerged shortly after, you can see that quite clearly.
Songs like ‘Keep Yourself Alive’ and ‘Great King Rat’ fizzled with an electrification which only the burgeoning heavy metal scene could cultivate, and although these paths undoubtedly strayed from their roots more as time went on, it’s evident that Queen would have been nothing had Iommi and his band not quickly laid the groundwork first.
Of course, both Queen and Black Sabbath are now seen as bands of a certain 1970s vintage. That’s no insult to them, but it’s testament to the fact that the original sound of heavy metal was so bespoke to that era that it couldn’t be mistaken for anything else. Everyone comes from something, but Iommi and Black Sabbath were always the darkest exception.
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