The Black Sabbath album Tony Iommi said “just didn’t work”
At the dawn of the 1970s, Black Sabbath beckoned a new era for rock music. The 1960s had been an era of cultural upheaval as rock music spread its wings across the Western world. The next decade would take bold new steps, with dynamic genre propagation working listeners into tighter niches and cliques. Ozzy Osbourne’s four-piece from Birmingham took the heavy rock sound of The Who, Led Zeppelin and The Beatles’ proto-metal anthem, ‘Helter Skelter’, and moulded it into a beast of their own: heavy metal.
Setting out with their eponymous debut album in 1970, Sabbath set the bar high for themselves and their heavy metal contemporaries, which at the time, consisted of Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin. While the latter was more often associated with the prog-rock scene, these three bands are often regarded in retrospect as the ‘Unholy Trinity’.
Had Black Sabbath called it a day after their seminal debut, they would still be a household name with classics like ‘N.I.B.’ and ‘The Wizard’ highlighting a bulletproof assortment. Fortunately, the band progressed through the early ‘70s to release a string of highly successful and influential albums. Paranoid, Master of Reality, Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath arrived between 1970 and ‘73 to shake the foundations of rock ‘n’ roll, but entering the middle of the decade, this momentum tapered somewhat.
Following the release of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in 1973, Osbourne began to lose interest in the direction the band was moving. When, two years later, the band released Sabotage, an internal conflict became apparent in a marked loss of coherence and quality. Compounding issues at the time were the members’ worsening drug and alcohol issues.
This situation only worsened as the band entered the second half of the ‘70s. The final album the group would record with Osbourne front and centre would be 1976’s Technical Ecstasy. At this juncture, the punk scene and burgeoning soft rock acts like Fleetwood Mac and Eagles appeared to steal the show from Black Sabbath.
In 2021, Tony Iommi discussed his least favourite Black Sabbath albums in a feature with Guitar World. Pulling Technical Ecstasy to one side for critique, the guitarist said: “Black Sabbath fans generally don’t like much of Technical Ecstasy. It was really a no-win situation for us. If we had stayed the same, people would have said we were still doing the same old stuff. So we tried to get a little more technical, and it just didn’t work out very well.”
Despite lamenting a misguided attempt to move with the times, Iommi saved a greater portion of his scorn for the group’s 1983 effort Born Again, the only Sabbath record to feature Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan on lead vocals.
Noting a lack of chemistry with the singer, Iommi said: “When we first put that line-up together, it was only on paper – done purely by lawyers. Ian is a great singer, but he’s from a completely different background, and it was difficult for him to come in and sing Sabbath material. To be honest, I didn’t like some of the songs on that album – and the production was awful.”
Listen to ‘Back Street Kids’, the opening song from Technical Ecstasy, below.
