(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros. Records)
Mon 23 March 2026 19:00, UK
Black Sabbath’s first album was a mess. The most beautiful mess in all of rock history. But a mess all the same.
You have to keep in mind that no one had a clue what the hell this band was doing at the time. Sure, rock music was topping the charts, but Black Sabbath were taking things to a whole new level, what we now recognise as the beginning of heavy metal, for a lot of people at the time, this was just aggressive noise that had no place in the music business.
A couple of record label executives saw the potential, and so they decided to put a little bit of money into the band and see what they came up with. When I say a little, I really mean a little, as when Ozzy Osbourne and co were putting together their debut record, they only had enough funding for eight hours of studio time. However, if anything, the rushed nature of the making of the record helped them, as that grainy, imperfect sound only added to its metal aesthetic.
After that debut, those record label executives suddenly had proof of concept, and so they felt comfortable putting a bit more money into album number two. Black Sabbath headed down to South Wales, Rockfield Studio, where they played, ate and slept for a couple of days, as Paranoid came together. The additional time meant that they could put a bit more into their lyrics, and even wrote some songs on the fly when at the studio.
The title track, ‘Paranoid’, was written by Tony Iommi because they needed to fill a few more minutes on the record. While the rest of the band went out to lunch, Iommi worked on putting a riff together and came up with what is now one of the most iconic guitar lines on the planet.
“Rodger Bain, the producer, suggested that we might think about doing a commercial song. We were adamant that we wouldn’t, but he said, ‘See what you can come up with,’ so we went off on our lunch break, and when we got back, Tony had come up with the riff,” said Bill Ward. “I sat down, Ozzy went to his mic, Geezer strapped on his bass, and we started playing. What you hear on the album is literally 25 minutes of work!”
As well as using the time to come up with songs in the studio, Geezer Butler could spend more hours working out the lyrics to different tracks. One of the standout offerings on the record is the protest anthem ‘War Pigs’; however, the words that accompanied what Butler called one of the heaviest riffs of all time were those for ‘Iron Man’. With how chaotic the track sounded, Butler thought it was only fair he put some equally carnage-based words to it.
“I suppose it came from the fact that I love science fiction,” he said. “Tony came up with the riff to ‘Iron Man’. It was one of the heaviest riffs I had ever heard. I wanted something that reflected the heaviness of the riff.”
Butler concluded, “I was really into science fiction, at the time, I wanted to write about space travel. America had just put a man on the moon, so there was a lot of things about space travel going around the news at the time. It just clicked, and it came out like that.”
