The blues bands that originally inspired Black Sabbath
When thinking of Black Sabbath, an ominous sense of the occult and thunderous metal riffs comes to the fore, with images of leather jackets, wispy facial hair, and Ozzy Osbourne’s distinctive wail following suit.
After all, the Birmingham quartet are widely celebrated as the founders of the metal genre. What would become the full-bodied version of the form was teased before their emergence with Iron Buttrerfly’s sinister hippie hit ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ and other classics such as Steppenwolf’s ‘Born to be Wild’. However, Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward made rock music much heavier, pulsating and darker than ever before.
With their self-titled 1970 debut – featuring the haunting image of the woman on the front cover – Sabbath evoked a fascination with folk horror that took hold as the counterculture and the world became mired in darkness. This new aesthetic, in addition to appropriately arcane music, saw them quickly rise and divide opinion in these early days. Wasting no time, they followed up their debut with the more refined Paranoid later in the year. This fresh form would come to be hailed as heavy metal.
A period of excellence followed for the quartet, with them continuing to push their formula to new, stoned heights, with albums such as Master of Reality and Vol. 4 becoming cornerstones of future offshoots such as stoner and sludge metal. With Master of Reality – arguably their best effort – Sabbath confirmed the general blueprint for the metal genre, which future artists would make their own and make the form the multifaceted leviathan it is today.
Despite the group’s inextricable connection to the world of heaviness, when they were young stoners crafting their distinctive sound, they took more inspiration from blues-oriented bands than their era’s other heavy pioneers. Ultimately, the metal that Sabbath conceived is a form of blues rock, as it emerged through their love of Ten Years After, the original Fleetwood Mac and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers.
This was something that Ozzy Osbourne revealed when speaking to Rolling Stone in 2022. “We started off playing jazz blues like Ten Years After, the original Fleetwood Mac with Jeremy Spencer and Peter Green, and John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers,” he said.
The frontman continued: “Then when we used to rehearse at this community [centre]. Across the road was a movie theatre. [Tony or Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler] said, ‘Don’t you think it’s weird that people pay money to go and watch horror films? Let’s start doing scary music.’ And one of the earliest things we did was [sings three notes to ‘Black Sabbath’]… That was like, ‘Fuck me, that’s good.'”
Listen to Peter Green’s Fleetwood Mac below.
