(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros. Records)
Sat 21 March 2026 0:00, UK
There is no clear reference point for where a band like Black Sabbath comes from.
Even when rock and roll was getting heavier, was there really anyone who was asking for a band that sounded like they walked out of the crypt with a singer who was bellowing to the heavens whenever he sang songs like ‘War Pigs’? Those aren’t the kind of bands that come out on a whim, and while it took Ozzy Osbourne and the rest of his band to click, they did have other plans before they landed on the more macabre-leaning songs that they would become known for.
Because, really, the fact that they managed to scare the living hell out of every single person was almost by accident. The band were rehearsing across the street from a movie theatre that was showing horror movies, and since they figured that people would pay good money to be frightened every time they entered the cinema, why not try to make rock and roll sound a bit more menacing as well?
If we’re breaking down the real origins of Sabbath, though, it doesn’t necessarily start with ‘The Ozzman’. No, Sabbath has forever been Tony Iommi’s band, and even when Osbourne left the fold, the fact that Iommi could keep the engine running was all down to the way that he played guitar. The man simply had the devil at his fingertips, and the tone he got was so gnarly that you’d wonder if he was actually the one who sold his soul to Satan at a crossroads.
But whereas most artists wanted to find their own sound during that time, Sabbath at least had a pretty good idea of who they didn’t want to be. They had been through years of the ‘Summer of Love’ schlock that had been populating the charts, and while they liked the idea of living in peace together, they would rather sing songs about what was really going on in the mean streets of Birmingham.
And if you were looking to make harder music, all roads led back to the blues. Whether it was the sounds of soul music or the blues rock of Led Zeppelin, every single band had got their start playing that same blues scale and running through their own pain when they performed, but for a brief second, Osbourne felt that they had a lot more in common with what a band like Fleetwood Mac were doing around that time.
You have to remember that ‘The Mac’ were the epitome of blues when Peter Green was at the helm, and ‘The Prince of Darkness’ definitely saw a bit of his future in what they were doing, saying, “We started off as a six-piece. We had a saxophone player, a slide guitar player. . . we kind of modelled ourselves on the original Fleetwood Mac vibe. There was a big blues thing in England, and we started playing twelve-bar blues, which was easy to do as a singer. If you listen to those early riffs, you can easily turn any of them into a twelve-bar.”
Sadly, as funny as the idea of Osbourne dressing up as Stevie Nicks would be, it was never really in the cards. There were a few early Fleetwood Mac tunes that would have worked in Sabbath’s realm like ‘Black Magic Woman’, but the lion’s share of their material was about getting a bit more nasty, like the wah-wah soaked dread that you hear at the beginning of ‘Electric Funeral’.
So while everyone might have been stealing from what the blues artists had done before them, Iommi figured that things could get a lot better if he started to twist the riffs around a little bit. Sure, they didn’t necessarily sound nice and pretty like everyone else, but since when was rock and roll supposed to sound sophisticated?
