The Black Sabbath album Tony Iommi called a “nightmare”
At the dawn of the 1970s, Black Sabbath blazed a new trail for rock music. The 1960s had been an era of colour and cultural upheaval, with rock music stretching its legs into ever tighter niches. With genre propagation continuing into the ‘70s, Ozzy Osbourne’s four-piece from Birmingham took the heavy rock sound of Led Zeppelin one step further with dark, satanic undertones to match.
Setting out with their eponymous debut album in 1970, Sabbath set the bar high for themselves and their early heavy metal contemporaries, Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. While the latter is more readily associated with the prog-rock movement, these three bands are often retrospectively regarded as the ‘Unholy Trinity’.
Had Black Sabbath disbanded after their eponymous debut, they would still be a household name with classics like ‘N.I.B.’ and ‘The Wizard’ highlighting a bulletproof LP. Thankfully, the band progressed through the early ‘70s to release a string of similarly successful and influential albums: Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.
Following the arrival of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in 1973, Osbourne began to lose interest in the band’s creative direction. When, two years later, the band released Sabotage, internal conflict was evident in a marked loss of coherence. Compounding issues at the time were the members’ worsening drug and alcohol issues and a bitter court drama.
During a 2023 interview with Louder Sound, guitarist Tony Iommi remembered Sabotage as a particularly straining period for the band. “Oh, it was a nightmare,” he said. “We had a court case with our ex-manager, Patrick Meehan [who had recently been replaced by been replaced by Don Arden], while we were in the middle of making the album. We’d get a writ, and we’d end up having to go into bloody court in the morning, all dressed up, then try to get back to the studio afterwards to carry on working. It was hard to come up with things. You had to have two heads.”
Although the court case fractured recording sessions, Iommi recalled that the experience became a source of inspiration for songwriter Geezer Butler. “[Geezer] wrote one song called ‘The Writ’, so it influenced him, that’s for sure,” Iommi continued. “I think the aggression definitely came out in the music when we played together. There is some really heavy stuff on that record.”
Listen to Black Sabbath’s ‘The Writ’ below. The song was inspired by a lawyer who would turn up unexpectedly during sessions to serve the band legal papers. “They used to turn up all the bloody time,” Iommi commented. “We never knew they were coming. If we did, we’d have disappeared sharpish.”
