The lunch break that transformed Black Sabbath: “People went nuts”
Nobody knew that the debut album from Black Sabbath was going to do as well as it did. It seems silly now to think that, given the band are praised as being one of the very best and famous for setting the foundation that heavy metal was built upon, but at the time, the record label was taking a huge risk on Sabbath and their doom-laden sound.
There was something about that debut record which appealed to the public at large. The UK was still locked in a bit of a depression as it licked its wounds, still fresh from World War II, and attempting to get back on its feet. A lot of people were working dead-end jobs and didn’t know what the future held. Sabbath managed to capture the fear and frustration of the time and package it into their music. Their sound was both a friend acknowledging your pain and a form of escapism.
The album took off, and as a result, the record label demanded that Sabbath go and record another. Within a few months, they were back in the studio, isolated from the rest of the country, which had suddenly become huge fans, in a bid to put together an album which would cement them as rock royalty. They managed to do that with Paranoid.
“If a band started to break, they told you, ‘You have to go back in the studio’,” recalled Bill Ward, Black Sabbath’s drummer. The band went away to start working on their album, which would be called Paranoid; however, at the time, they intended on naming it after their song ‘War Pigs’.
“Our first album came out in 1970,” he said, “Four months later, they said we had to do another one!”
The most important thing for Sabbath when recording the album was not losing their energetic edge. It could be argued that a lot of the reason why people enjoyed their debut so much was because of the short period they had to record it. The band were only allotted around eight hours to put it together, so they had to record the majority of it live, which added to the gritty and heavy nature of the album. The band had an otherworldly live sound, and they intended to portray that in their second record.
“We were very tight. We’d been playing together for over two years; we’d been through Germany and Switzerland. When we played together, we wanted to improve and be really good,” said Ward, “You have to remember, this was a very good live band coming into the studio for Paranoid. The producer, Rodger Bain, has to be praised too, but I think we delivered our aggression and on-stage dynamics in the studio – perhaps not completely, but mostly.”
They had experience playing the majority of the songs on the album live, as they had been written before the recording sessions. As such, transferring that sound from the stage to the studio was relatively simple. However, once all the tracks were laid down, the band still had about three minutes left to use. They clambered around for a filler song, while their producer suggested they try to write something more commercial. They were hesitant at first, but their decision to try to write such a song led to the creation of the title track.
“Rodger Bain, the producer, suggested that we might think about doing a commercial song. We were adamant that we wouldn’t, but he said, ‘See what you can come up with,’ so we went off on our lunch break and when we got back, Tony had come up with the riff,” said Ward, “I sat down, Ozzy went to his mic, Geezer strapped on his bass and we started playing. What you hear on the album is literally 25 minutes of work! The only thing we added was Tony’s guitar solo, which he recorded the next day. I couldn’t believe how that song went off: everybody went nuts about it.”
The band knew they were onto something special, so not only did ‘Paranoid’ find its way onto the album, but Sabbath decided to use it as the record’s name. Now, ‘Paranoid’ is widely considered one of the greatest songs that Sabbath ever recorded and is one of their most recognisable tunes.
