Black Widow: The band too satanic for Black Sabbath
The minute that heavy metal arrived on people’s doorsteps in the early 1970s, everyone’s first reaction was fear. It’s easy to reject things that you don’t understand, but once people peeled back the layers of heaviness, a lot of the biggest names in proto-metal were taking the basis of the blues and adding some new textures onto it that no one had ever thought of before. While Black Sabbath may have been considered the most demonic of them all, there were still some boundaries that even they wouldn’t cross.
When the Birmingham legends were first becoming popular, they got the tag of being Satanic almost by accident. There was already an ominous feeling to the front cover of their debut album, but once people heard about figures in black standing before Ozzy Osbourne and misinterpreting ‘N.I.B.’ as ‘Nativity In Black’, it wasn’t hard to put two and two together by assuming that they were members of the occult.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, though. The band would eventually lean into their dark persona, but Tony Iommi sported a cross around his beck whenever they played, and Geezer Butler’s lyrics on a song like ‘After Forever’ are practically Christian metal. But labels don’t need long to stick, and when bands like Black Widow started rising in notoriety, pairing them with Black Sabbath would have been a no-brainer.
The only issue was the fact that Black Widow were the real deal. Sabbath could play coy with the occult imagery when they wanted to, but these guys were never afraid to talk about Satanic stories in their material, with Sacrifice being a story cloaked in dark imagery and featuring genuine words alluding to black magic.
And it’s not like they didn’t have tunes to back it up. Before their singles got banned by the BBC, they were predicted to chart fairly high, and considering how a band like Coven got their foot in the door with ‘One Tin Soldier’ and practising occultist acts, it wasn’t out of the question for Black Widow to find their footing. As they prepared to go on tour with Sabbath, though, it turned out their behaviour was a bit too close for comfort for the metal legends.
According to the band, Sabbath ended up pulling out of the deal the minute that they found out what they did in their spare time, saying, “We never managed to get to the States as we were banned there after Charles Manson did his black magic murders they thought sending us over there so soon after would not be a good thing so our management sent Black Sabbath who they had recently signed up, who then denied anything to do with black magic.”
The Manson murders were too spooky for many Americans for obvious reasons, but Sabbath in particular had already been through enough. Butler, in particular, had already dealt with the story of the song ‘Black Sabbath’ happening to him in real life, and since they had also worked on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath in a haunted castle, they didn’t need any more bad vibes coming their way once they got on the road.
Still, there was a good chance that Black Widow could have been another progenitor to shock rock if they had the opportunity to break on the other side of the Atlantic. After all, people had already embraced the macabre sounds of someone like Screamin’ Jay Hawkins, so hearing a band that actually practised what they preached could have sparked terror into the hearts of millions.
