The one Black Sabbath song Ozzy Osbourne calls his “anthem”
Black Sabbath were a phenomenon when they burst onto the scene at the beginning of the 1970s. They didn’t simply breakthrough the crowd, pushing their way to the front and demanding they be given the spotlight, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward set the whole stage on fire and created a seance for the burnt up ashes that floated up to the sky.
The world of rock and roll was a tough nut to crack at the time. It’s no surprise that some of the greatest of the genre emerged during this stiffly fought period. Black Sabbath managed to achieve their dreams through unbridled talent and a desire to change things. They did so with a canon of songs that cracked through the public consciousness and announced the arrival of heavy metal. That said, Ozzy Osbourne considers one song to be the band’s most important.
Trying to pick the greatest song from an oeuvre as impressive as Black Sabbath’s is no mean feat, but the singer did manage to select one particular tune as the group’s most defiant. Osbourne was speaking on a radio programme in 2019 when he picked the iconic Sabbath song ‘Paranoid’ is not only the band’s most important song but his own personal anthem.
“I think it has to be ‘Paranoid’ from Black Sabbath. I still play that song live on stage, I end the show with it… I just call it my anthem,” said Osbourne when posed with the song that still holds the most important for him as a performer. The reasoning for picking the song seemed to be that it was the song that launched them into the rock stratosphere from relative obscurity.
“I went to school with Tony Iommi from Black Sabbath,” said Osbourne referring to the band’s powerhouse guitarist. “I wasn’t friendly with him in school, though we became mates. Black Sabbath is a band with local guys that had a dream, and it all came true.” Much of that dream scenario becoming reality can be traced back to ‘Paranoid. I remember when Roger Bain, the producer [of ‘Paranoid], said, ‘Just jam something out, we need it to finish the album.’ We just jammed and ‘Paranoid’ came out, and it was a hit single.”
It wasn’t simply those involved who loved this long, it resonated with fans, not only because of its powerful riff: “People would say, ‘That ‘Paranoid’ is great, it’s gonna be huge.’ When you’re in the bubble looking out, it’s a completely different view than from outside the bubble looking in. I mean, I’d become in my own way a Beatle, you know?” It was a life-changing moment and it arrived without much forethought, a perfectly fitting moment of pure expression which added extra weight to their iconic album of the same name.
“It’s a simple song with an effective rhythm,” Osbourne explained. “It’s got its own colour, it’s got its own vibe. I like to think that people in the years to come will still get enjoyment out of it. Every now and then you get a song from nowhere, it’s a gift – that was one of them songs that came out of nowhere, the biggest hit earlier on. It was the first time that I had a Top 10 single, apart from ‘Changes’ with my daughter Kelly. It’s one of those songs, it stands around the time. And I hope people in the future get as much enjoyment as people now get it.”
Anyone who was lucky enough to catch an Osbourne live show in recent years will have noted the song’s inclusion in his sets. Singing it wasn’t something that Osbourne had planned on. “When I first departed from Sabbath [in the late ’70s], I said, ‘I’m not gonna do any more Sabbath.’ And then the kids were going, ‘We want to hear this one, ‘Iron Man,’ ‘War Pigs,’ ‘Paranoid’…And then I thought, ‘Why not?’. Every night, I’ll do that song somewhere in my show. It’s one of those songs that I can’t get away from, it’s still as much fun to play now as it was back then. It’s a good song.”
There is no doubt that Osbourne and the gang will play the song during their upcoming reunion show and, there is even littler doubt that the track will land with a heavy thud of applause and thousands of people losing their minds.
