When a satanist cult invited Black Sabbath to play a show at Stonehenge
Most musicians would use a satanic invitation to perform as perhaps the headline story of their memoirs. For Black Sabbath, it was just another day.
Such were the life and times of Ozzy Osbourne, along with the rest of his band, that this bizarre tale almost went under the radar because it paled in comparison to all the rest of their wild antics over the years. Biting heads off bats, drugging unsuspecting vicars, and hurling slabs of meat at audiences were all too much fun for a satanic near-miss to even get a look in.
But even still, the heavy metal pioneers’ lure towards the dark side was so beguiling that it simply proved irresistible to some pretty questionable characters, so much so that they were invited to join their gang. In classic Sabbath style, there was no context or caveat offered to this cautionary tale, yet you can still imagine it was dealt with in their typically kindly way.
Without giving any other information as to how this could have possibly come about, the frontman once told Mojo that he was approached by a satanist cult and asked if he and the band would perform a show at Stonehenge. As you might imagine, his declining response was not exactly what you would call polite and genteel. “I told them to fuck off,” he said.
Whether Osbourne didn’t like the idea of dancing with the dark side or being mockingly chalked up to Spinal Tap was difficult to say, but it was clear that if the band were to ever stage themselves in such a location, no matter how iconic it may be, he was to have no part in the proceedings.
That speaks volumes about the band’s split in the 1980s, when Osbourne struck off on his own wild adventures and left the rest of his former friends behind him. Then, with Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan temporarily fronting the group, their 1983 album was called Born Again. But in this spirit, and in the namesake to one of the tracks, manager Don Arden had grand ambitions.
“”Presumably because we had an instrumental called Stonehenge on the album, Don wanted a Stonehenge stage set, with a massive sun rising up behind the stones as the show progressed,” Geezer Butler wrote in his memoir, Into the Void. The consensus wasn’t exactly overwhelmingly positive. “I thought it was an utterly ridiculous idea.”
Eventually, the idea was scrapped after a comedy of errors, not least the scale of the rocks being misinterpreted by the sage designer and them ending up so large that they almost hit the ceilings of the arenas they were playing in, Butler recalled. All of this does bear a rather cynical resemblance to Spinal Tap, you must admit.
But despite often being asked if he has seen the film, Butler only has one deadpan response. “I always reply, ‘Seen it? I’ve lived it.’” In this sense, there was never a truer word said. Between their ‘Crazy Train’ of antics and dodging the bullet of Satan, it was clear that Black Sabbath were always on a rollercoaster ride.
