Black Sabbath had a mysterious spiritual fifth member
Black Sabbath have seen their fair share of lineup changes. When Ozzy Osbourne left the band in 1979, he was replaced by former Rainbow singer Ronnie James Dio, and the band took on a new approach to the metal genre. Where Ozzy’s Sabbath were doomy and sludgy, the Dio Sabbath were more rock and borderline glam.
Yet the classic lineup of Sabbath is, without doubt, Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, Tony Iommi on guitar, Geezer Butler on bass and Bill Ward on drums. This was the band’s lineup when all the best Sabbath music was written. It also contains the band’s original founding members, so it was great to see them back at it at the closing ceremony of the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham – though Butler was not present due to illness.
However, Tony Iommi once said that despite the band being a foursome, they “always felt within the band that there was a fifth member who guided us,” Iommi said. “It sounds ridiculous now, but we always felt that there was somebody overlooking us and guiding us. We felt this presence when we were all together. It was one of those things we’d refer to as being the over-self or the fifth member, looking out for us”.
“We were so close as a band, we lived in each other’s pockets from the start, that we became as one. This fifth member seemed very real and there to us,” he added.
However, the fact remains that, like many of the heavy rock bands of the 1970s, Sabbath were pushing their drug use to the absolute limit. After all, ‘Sweet Leaf’ is probably the most beautiful love song anyone has written about smoking weed.
Along with weed, Sabbath were known to try pretty much anything bar the really hard drugs. So a combination of cocaine, mushrooms, ecstasy, alcohol and LSD, amongst other things, was bound to upset the consciousness and give a ghostly, haunting atmosphere to the times the band experienced together.
“Things always seemed to happen to us that were quite weird,” Iommi added about the mysterious fifth member of the band. “We’d be in the van, for example, and one of us would look out of the window and go: ‘Oh look, there’s a fish and chip shop over there’. And just as we’d say that, the lights would go out in the shop. There were just always strange things happening to us back then”.
