(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros. Records)
Sun 12 October 2025 2:00, UK
The 1960s were never a decade that would have been ready for a group like Black Sabbath.
The era of Flower Power already had to worry about protesting against the war with peace and love, and if they were already spooked by people like Iggy Pop and Alice Cooper, the hippies would have had a heart attack the minute that they saw Ozzy Osbourne in action. But it turned out that Sabbath were always going to be a bit standoffish with a few members of the Summer of Love as well.
Granted, it’s not like there weren’t pieces of the Woodstock generation in their delivery. ‘The Prince of Darkness’ may have been seen as a sinister figure, but the fact that he left off every single show by saying ‘God Bless You All’ and would be flashing the peace sign every single time he was onstage wasn’t really the work of a living demon or anything.
If anything, they were actually standing with what their contemporaries were saying at the time. The way that soldiers were being treated in ‘War Pigs’ wasn’t all that different from what the protests in the US were talking about, and if Bob Dylan had started to fade from the mainstream at the time, people may as well have listened to what was coming from Geezer Butler’s pen half the time.
But looking at where Sabbath came from, they weren’t about to start talking about peace and happiness on a whim. They had come from the hard streets of Birmingham, and given all of the carnage that they had seen every single day, they weren’t going to talk about sticking a flower in their hair. Osbourne may have loved that kind of music, but according to drummer Bill Ward, he remembered that the rest of the group had an incredibly negative reaction to the hippie generation.
As much as it looked like a drugged-out utopia, Ward said that it all felt like a lie to them half the time, saying, “We all had feelings about the counterculture. I think we all felt ‘Well, that’s all well and good, but that’s not what’s going on right now. I’m sitting here looking at a guy getting his guts beaten up.’ Our music began to take a good look at what was really on the ground and what we were seeing. I think it had a huge impact on Sabbath.”
It’s not like they didn’t know those rough experiences firsthand. Before he was even out of his teens, Osborne was already in and out of prison for shoplifting, and while ‘Fairies Wear Boots’ sounds like a whimsical title, the whole thing started from run-ins that the band had with a group of skinheads, who kept calling them fairies because of them daring to have long hair.
So if the peace and love angle wasn’t going to work, Osbourne remembered Tony Iommi having the idea to go in the opposite direction, saying, “We used to rehearse across the street from a movie theatre and Tony said, ‘Isn’t it strange how people pay money to get frightened? Why don’t we make scary music.’” And they certainly practised what they preached the minute that the first song on their first album dropped.
It may have been based on classical music, but after adding lyrics about a demonic encounter and putting Osbourne’s booming voice on top of everything, this was no longer a heavy dose of blues rock. This was the beginning of a whole new genre, and despite fans still wanting to create peace on Earth in many respects, this took a bold stake through the heart of every single remaining hippie.
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