Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi sat down with Loudwire Nights and discussed the band’s early days. During the chat, the guitarist admitted not having any regrets over the band’s early sound and brought up how the association with religion has helped the band gain recognition:
“It certainly brought everybody’s attention to it. So I think it was great. We did that. It was something very different. I didn’t even realize — I didn’t even think of it as anything like that. It just appealed to me when I played it. And it’s all. And we liked it. And then Ozzy came up with this melody line, and Geezer [Butler] wrote the lyrics for it, so everything just fitted in and it just sounded right. And that was our launch, really.”
He also recalled how the band had to let others know when they released new songs since there was no Internet back then:
“But, of course, in them days, there was no MTV and all that sort of stuff, and no Internet. It was word of mouth, so you really did have to go and play at these places and build up a reputation — either a good reputation or a bad one, whichever way it went — but you had to physically… If it had been Internet in them days, who knows what would have happened? Or MTV.”
How ‘Black Sabbath’ Was Made
Black Sabbath’s self-titled album came out exactly 54 years ago. Since then, it has become one of the most popular Black Sabbath albums along with a few others. In 2021, Iommi talked about how the song ‘Black Sabbath’ was made when he was on the ‘Backstaged: The Devil In Metal’ podcast. He recalled:
“Just one day we were in the rehearsal room and I started playing, as I did, ideas and this riff came out and I thought, ‘God.’ I really liked it and the other guys said, ‘Ah, that’s really good. We really like that.’ So, I put more to it and that was it, it became ‘Black Sabbath’. We built it up, but that was immediate — once we’d done that song, that was the direction and we knew where we were going then from that first riff. It just gave us a certain feeling.”
Hear the album down below.