The 1995 album that doomed Black Sabbath
In the context of what the band was, Black Sabbath being doomed almost just sounds like a marketing ploy to elicit even more intrigue about their dark and twisted ways.
But in 1995, a marketing ploy would have seemed like a divine intervention swooping in to save them, as the band were starkly staring down the barrel of completely and utterly selling out – in short, things were already not looking good, and one particularly disastrous album only served to make things even worse.
By this point, Tony Iommi was the only original member of the band left still grinding away at the coalface, which he really should have taken as an omen that there were many turbulent storms to weather. Yet even without most of us being well-known rock stars, surely you would realise that sticking a rap section into a heavy metal album was not the answer?
Clearly, there was a lot of baggage that went along with this story, as this was exactly what happened on the 1995 album Forbidden, with rapper Ice-T stepping in on the opening track, ‘The Illusion of Power’, to provide a bizarre hip-hop clash. Needless to say, it was the record label’s idea, and not so much Sabbath’s.
This was just one example, but it was emblematic of the downward spiral in which the band had found themselves trapped for years at this point. They’d had an ever-changing spate of firings and re-hirings, a litany of failed albums, and were under constant record label pressure to evolve into something they simply were not.
In this sense, Forbidden was only the manifestation of all their problems. To be fair, it had mainly been a rush job to simply fulfil their contractual obligations with label IRS and then get the hell out of there, but their hastiness to be freed only made them realise that the grass was not, in fact, any greener on the other side once they were finally out.
Drastic times called for drastic measures. After the disaster that was Forbidden, Iommi was forced to put the band into a cooling-off period, of sorts, where he had to figure out exactly what they were going to do next. In that time, he worked on a solo album, but knew it wasn’t right without his original comrades in tow. It was time to get on the phone.
Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne hadn’t been on speaking terms for some time at that point, so there were a few bridges that needed to be rebuilt first. Yet by 1997, the proper Black Sabbath line-up – minus Bill Ward – were back together, and there was seemingly no stopping them. That was, of course, until the pair fell out again a little over a decade later, but let’s brush over that for the purpose of our own sanity.
It was, after all, actually quite fitting that Black Sabbath came so close to the brink of death, had a dance with the devil, and then eventually managed to claw it back. If there was anything that epitomised the centre of their dark hearts more, it might just have been that. At one point, they did seem doomed forever, but it was never truly over until the last curtain fell.
