“Scared stiff”: When fear of a nuclear holocaust informed Black Sabbath’s 1970 masterpiece
It’s easy to look back on the crossover of the 1960s and ‘70s through rose-tinted glasses and harvest a romantic generalisation of the era. We can pretend things were warmer, simpler, and happier, based on how vibrant the culture and music was of those days. But dig a little deeper, and ask yourself why it felt so vital?
The kaleidoscopic colour of the hippie and liberal movement was ultimately necessary for the societal darkness it was pushing back against. A threatening sense of political authoritarianism, combined with the rising brutality of the Vietnam War and the threat of nuclear weapons, gave the sky a much gloomier outlook than we like to remember, and really, the romanticism exists solely in the spirit of those countering it.
Perhaps more often than not, we focus on reminiscing through the upbeat disposition of classic and folk rock. Sun kissed melodies and light breezed harmonies are remembered as the soundtrack of liberalism when in actual fact, the heavier musical worlds proved to be just as vital. The palpable sense of communal anger needed to be distilled and put into a record, which Black Sabbath quickly realised and thus provided, with their seminal sophomore record, Paranoid.
“I was scared stiff that we’d be dragged into Vietnam, and World War III seemed a very real event,” Sabbath’s bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler explained, 50 years on from the actual track. “I was really into flower power in the sixties. I went to the love-ins at Woburn Abbey in sixty-seven and sixty-eight, with kaftan, beads, and flowers in my hair. But by the time we wrote the Paranoid album reality had set in. A lot of my lyrics were my disappointment that the love era was just a pipe dream. The love-ins and protests were all in vain.”
The ‘60s felt somewhat optimistic that genuine change could be actioned, but the ‘70s swiftly squashed all of that. Reality came with a sober intent and thrust everybody into socio-economic and political strife. The great cities of the world were in dire straits, and the global conflicts just continued on with more fervour. The music couldn’t be escapist anymore; it had to engage.
Paranoid understood that, most evidently on ‘War Pigs’, the band’s iconic anti-war hit. And while Butler was still the driving force behind the creative intent of the song, writing lyrics that were in keeping with his aforementioned concerns, it was really Ozzy Osbourne who set it alight.
He, too, was a child of the flower-power generation, but clearly felt as disillusioned with it as Butler and so decided to be the voice that ushered in a new era of revolutionary anger. His siren call of a vocal performance put an end to the leniency of the previous liberal attitude and instead proclaimed that enough was enough; the abuse of power was to be called out by heavy metal.
And so, just like that, with Black Sabbath turned liberalism on its head and created a record that truly showcased what it was like to live through the ‘60s and ‘70s.
