BLACK SABBATH Trivia — 18 Entries
18 sourced facts about BLACK SABBATH.
Trivia
In Japan, the 1970 debut Black Sabbath is known under a translated title meaning 'the black day of rest' — a Japanese rendering of the phrase 'black sabbath' itself. According to Universal Music Japan, the record was released on Britain's Vertigo label on February 13, 1970, which happened to be a Friday. Produced by Roger Bain, it is regarded as a landmark that took jazz and blues apart and rebuilt them into heavy rock, reaching No. 8 in the UK and No. 23 in the US — a band of such dark repute having, fittingly, marked its very starting point on Friday the 13th.
Black Sabbath, in the lineup that included Ozzy Osbourne, made its first-ever visit to Japan at Ozzfest Japan 2013, held on May 11 and 12, 2013 at Makuhari Messe in Chiba. The band closed the two-day festival, opening with 'War Pigs' before rolling through songs from their first four albums. They also gave an early airing to 'God Is Dead?,' a new track from 13, which was due out that June, then ended the main set with 'Children Of The Grave' before an encore that ran the intro of 'Sabbath Bloody Sabbath' straight into 'Paranoid' — a set of about ninety minutes.
Released in 2013, 13 brought Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Ozzy Osbourne back into a studio together for the first time in thirty-five years — since 1978's Never Say Die. It was produced by the Grammy-winning Rick Rubin, with Brad Wilk newly brought in on drums. Original drummer Bill Ward had stood alongside the other three when the reunion was announced at the end of 2011, but he split from the band in 2012 over a contract he could not agree to, and did not take part in the album.
The band started out as a blues group called Earth, but changed its name after finding that another band was already using it. The new name came from one of their own songs, 'Black Sabbath,' whose title is usually traced to the 1963 Boris Karloff horror film Black Sabbath, directed by Italy's Mario Bava. Accounts of exactly how differ, however: by one telling, singer Ozzy Osbourne and bassist Geezer Butler had seen the film and set out to write a song with that title, while guitarist Tony Iommi has said that none of the band had actually seen it at the time.
Heavy metal's heavy sound can be traced back to an accident Tony Iommi suffered at seventeen. On what was to be his last shift at a sheet-metal factory — he was about to head off on a European tour with a band — his hand was caught in a huge guillotine-style press, taking the tips off two fingers on his fretting hand. Doctors removed the bone and told him he might as well forget about playing, but he refused to accept that. A turning point came when his former foreman from the factory visited and brought along records by Django Reinhardt, a jazz guitarist who had kept playing after several of his fingers were damaged in a fire. Iommi fashioned his own fingertip caps by melting down a plastic detergent bottle and covering the shapes with leather until they felt right, then painstakingly relearned the instrument. With less freedom in those fingers he leaned on simpler chord shapes — and that very limitation gave his guitar its distinctive, heavier tone.
'Paranoid,' the song most people associate with the band, began life as a last-minute throwaway written to fill out an album. Bassist Geezer Butler has recalled that the second album was recorded largely live in two or three days, and that when they found themselves about three minutes short, Tony Iommi came up with a riff, Butler dashed off the words, and Ozzy Osbourne sang them while reading them for the first time. Iommi, too, has said the track was never meant to be anything more than filler, but that because it was short it became a single — and ended up being how most people first knew the band. The lyric channels the anxiety of depression and drugs, and, fittingly, the word 'paranoid' is never once sung. It reached No. 4 in the UK and became one of their biggest hits.
'Iron Man' tells the story of a man who travels through time and witnesses the end of the world. On his way back to warn humanity he passes through a magnetic storm and is turned to iron. When no one believes him, his anger grows until he turns it on the human race — and in doing so brings about the very apocalypse he had foreseen. Lyricist Geezer Butler has said the song started after Ozzy Osbourne planted the idea in his head: walking down the street one day, he found himself wondering what it would be like if there were a great big man made out of metal wandering around.
On July 5, 2025, Black Sabbath played 'Back to the Beginning,' a final concert that brought all four original members — Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward — back together in their home city of Birmingham, at Villa Park. It was the original lineup's first show together in twenty years, staged as a charity event with a huge bill that included Metallica and Slayer, and with Rage Against the Machine's Tom Morello as its musical director. All of the proceeds went to three Birmingham charities: Cure Parkinson's, Birmingham Children's Hospital and Acorn Children's Hospice.
One of the ideas that pointed the band toward its sound came from a cinema that stood directly across from their rehearsal space. Seeing how much audiences enjoyed horror films, the members hit on the notion of making music that was frightening in the same way. That impulse to write 'scary' music became a starting point for the heavy, ominous style they would go on to be known for.
In 1968 Tony Iommi briefly joined Jethro Tull, staying only about two weeks. He appeared with the band on the Rolling Stones' Rock and Roll Circus television special, miming along to 'A Song for Jeffrey.' Iommi disliked the way Tull operated — he felt treated more like an employee than a bandmate — and soon returned to his own group. He did, however, take away Tull's disciplined approach to rehearsing, carrying that professional work ethic back to the band he shared with Ozzy, Geezer and Bill. Once they began practicing in a more structured way, they started writing the songs that would end up on their debut.
'War Pigs,' long understood as an anti-war song, takes as its subject the human urge to kill and destroy. Guitarist Tony Iommi has said the idea grew out of war stories the band heard after playing an American air force base on a European tour, and that the song was written during a bleak spell in Zurich, performing to tiny audiences for little money. It was shaped by the Vietnam War, then at its height; lyricist Geezer Butler has explained that his real point was that war itself is the true Satanism and that politicians are the true Satanists. The song's original title was 'Walpurgis,' after a festival rooted in paganism and witchcraft.
The second album, Paranoid, was originally meant to carry a different name. The band wanted to title it War Pigs, after one of its songs, but the record company had them use the milder Paranoid instead. A trace of the first idea survives on the sleeve, which shows a literal 'war pig' — a figure of a pig brandishing a sword and shield.
The early song 'N.I.B.' is a love song sung from the Devil's point of view. In it Satan falls in love with a human woman and sets out to seduce her; he comes across as genuinely charming, and the song's opening lyrics are quite poetic. For a band so often framed in terms of devil worship, in this song the Devil is cast simply as the one who has fallen in love.
'Fairies Wear Boots' is about skinheads. In the England of around 1970, skinheads were not racists but a kind of punk or anarchist, and the fact that they wore boots is where the title comes from. The lyric grew out of a real incident: after one show the band was set upon by a gang of skinheads, injuring Tony Iommi and forcing them to cancel their next gig. Bassist Geezer Butler has said the fight happened in Weston-super-Mare, and that since calling someone a 'fairy' was an insult back then, Ozzy Osbourne came up with the line 'fairies wear boots' as a jab at the skinheads who had come after them.
Released in 1971, 'Children Of The Grave' was written as a warning about the environment. It came just as the environmental movement was taking shape, and it carries a stark sense of what might happen if people keep neglecting the earth and destroying one another. Lyricist Geezer Butler has explained that pollution and a changing climate were only starting to register at the time, and that his point was that we will all become children of the grave unless something is done. The song became one of the band's live favorites — it stayed in the set even after Ronnie James Dio took over on vocals, and Ozzy Osbourne kept playing it during his solo career too.
'Sweet Leaf,' from Master of Reality, makes almost no secret of being about marijuana, and the whole band wrote it together. The song is credited with turning 'sweet leaf' into slang for marijuana; the phrase itself came from a pack of Irish cigarettes bearing the line 'It's the sweet leaf.' The band thought it was a perfect description and simply used it as the title.
One of the great turning points in the band's history came in 1979, when Ozzy Osbourne was ejected. Having lost its original singer, the band brought in Ronnie James Dio, who fronted them through to 1982. It marked the start of a second era, distinct from the Ozzy years.
The first time Black Sabbath's original lineup came back together was at Live Aid, the 1985 charity concert. Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward shared a stage for the first time since 1978. Their set that day included 'Paranoid' and 'Children Of The Grave.'