(Credits: TIDAL)
Sat 28 February 2026 22:00, UK
Half of what Tony Iommi came up with in Black Sabbath doesn’t even feel like it was made by humans.
The whole point of the band was making music to frighten people, and even if there was a bluesy slant to a lot of their music, there were more than a few times where you’d swear that Iommi was talking to dark spirits that were giving him the kind of riffs that were developed in Hell. But underneath all of the dark imagery and menacing music was a kid who was starting to fall in love with music by the time he started listening to rock and roll.
In fact, Iommi makes a good argument for Sabbath not being a heavy metal band at all. There are many people who have come after them who have called them the forefathers of the genre, but when you look at their reverence for the blues and their more laid-back demeanour on their first albums, they had a lot more in common with the average hard rock bands out at the time, like Led Zeppelin or The Rolling Stones.
Granted, there’s a good chance that even Mick Jagger and Keith Richards couldn’t have written something as menacing as ‘Paranoid’ or ‘War Pigs’. Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne were clearly tuned into something a lot darker, and since they had grown up in the rough and tumble neighbourhoods of Birmingham, they weren’t exactly going to be singing songs about the hippie movement and walking around with flowers in their hair.
They wanted an excuse to give everyone a wake-up call, but even without ‘The Prince of Darkness’ out front, you could always tell it was Sabbath from the way that Iommi played. His natural touch on the guitar may have taken a few dents after losing two of his fingers, but he had always wanted his guitar to be a voice in the band in the same way that he heard bands like The Shadows when he was growing up.
Although Hank Marvin might not have been the most eye-catching guitarist, in the same way that The Beatles were, his sound had a lot more body to it than a lot of the other British invasion bands. Their songs could take listeners on a journey only through a couple of great guitar riffs, and as long as Iommi followed that model, he felt like he could make a living like his hero when he first started playing.
He still had a healthy diet of bands like Led Zeppelin, but he felt that Marvin was where everything truly began, saying, “My first influences was the Shadows. I think [they] were an influence for a lot of people of my generation, because they were one of the first instrumental bands in England who could find copy, if you like. So they sort of started me off, and then after that I got into more of the blues players and jazz players.”
Sabbath didn’t need to worry about finding work as an instrumental band with that booming voice in front, but a lot of their song construction had the same mentality as what The Shadows were doing. They weren’t trying to make the average verse-chorus pop song, and when they went for it on some of their greatest tunes, it wasn’t that hard for them to switch things up and go into a completely different groove and tempo whenever they felt like it.
So while Iommi did have a lot more respect for what the blues players got out of their instruments, The Shadows are the unsung heroes when it comes to not only Sabbath, but to heavy metal as a whole. They didn’t play dark songs, and they weren’t even the most sinister band that the world had ever seen, but there was something about the mood of their music that resonated with people that weren’t into the same pop-centric rock and roll formula.