The classic Black Sabbath song recorded in John Lennon’s home: “The house was exactly the same”
By the time the 1980s rolled around, heavy metal music was in a fairly disastrous state. Gone were the early days of dark defiance and distorted industrialism, as the advent of hair metal and vapid self-indulgence permeated throughout the scene. Throughout it all, the metal pioneers of Black Sabbath were a guiding light, an oasis of authenticity within an ever-deteriorating scene. Of course, by the time the group came to record their 1981 album Mob Rules, there were no longer the young upstarts from Birmingham. They were globally successful and endlessly influential artists.
In that sense, Black Sabbath had a lot in common with John Lennon. After all, the former Beatle and rimmed-sunglasses enthusiast had risen from the unlikely surroundings of Liverpool to become, in his own words, “more popular than Jesus”. Although heavy metal was one genre where Lennon, or any of his former bandmates, dared to tread, Sabbath clearly held an appreciation for the revolutionary sounds of Lennon’s group. So much so that, when it came to the recording of Mob Rules, they found themselves in Lennon’s studio.
Mob Rules is an often overlooked album within Sabbath’s discography. For many, the group lost some of its appeal when Ozzy Osbourne was sacked in 1979. Furthermore, the album’s title track came around as a result of the band being asked to soundtrack the animated film Heavy Metal. So, the final product feels somewhat disjointed and not really in keeping with the early Sabbath sound that everybody knows and loves. Either way, Mob Rules is still much better than a lot of early 1980s metal music.
Within the track listing, the instrumental piece ‘E5150’ is among the most intriguing. According to guitarist Tony Iommi, the song was made for a specific sequence in Heavy Metal. “They wanted this effect thing,” he told Spin, “Where all these monsters were walking, were changing, and they wanted some music to go with that. That’s why that was recorded.” Iommi also dropped the unexpected fact, “We recorded that actually at John Lennon’s house. We put that together there.”
Apparently, the band had gone to Lennon’s Tittenhurst Park home in Ascot to record the album’s title track, ‘The Mob Rules’, and ended up recording ‘E5150’ as well. For these sessions, the group were able to use the former Beatle’s equipment and sound engineer. Lennon had passed away only a year prior to the recording of Mob Rules, so the house was virtually untouched according to Sabbath.
“He’d been dead a while,” Iommi shared, “But the house was exactly the same. I don’t know if you have ever seen the ‘Imagine’ video where you’ve got the white piano. That’s actually where we wrote ‘The Mob Rules’, in that room.” You likely couldn’t get further away from the peace-loving anthem of ‘Imagine’ than the heavy metal stylings of Black Sabbath, yet the equipment proved fairly interchangeable. “We set the gear up, and it was all Lennon’s gear as well,” the guitarist recalled, “we didn’t have any of our equipment.”
The resulting tracks would pail in comparison to anything Lennon had constructed in that studio, but the Ascot sessions for Mob Rules nevertheless provide a fitting connection between two pioneers of rock and roll songwriting.
