“Hard to beat”: The classic 1970 song that Tony Iommi was in awe of
What was the greatest song of 1970?
A brutally tough question for any music fan to truly answer. I mean, this was the year that kick-started the greatest decade of them all. Sure, The Beatles had just broken up, but in their wake came a generation of innovation-hungry musicians, and 1970 proved that emphatically.
There was Simon and Garfunkel’s ‘Bridge Over Troubled Water’, ‘Ohio’ by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young and ‘Immigrant Song’ by Led Zeppelin. But while each of those tracks, among others, was iconic in its own right, they didn’t come anywhere near the song that I wholeheartedly believe takes the top spot, as the year’s very best: ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath.
The title track of Sabbath’s sophomore album was a masterclass in heavy rock and perfectly encapsulated the spirit of the entire record, which come ‘70 was as welcomed as anything that had come before. The gates of opportunity and diversity had been smashed open by The Beatles in the decade before, and no Sabbath came charging through.
But Sabbath didn’t quite realise the genius they had. “The song ‘Paranoid’ was written as an afterthought,” explained Geezer Butler, “We basically needed a three-minute filler for the album, and Tony [Iommi] came up with the riff. I quickly did the lyrics, and Ozzy was reading them as he was singing.”
It was clear their perspectives on brilliance were warped, tainted by their own self-criticism, and so they barely realised that the song that lay before them was the benchmark for every band that existed around them. Plagued by the subtle nature of ego-fuelled competition, Sabbath and, in particular, the writer of ‘Paranoid’, Iommi looked at another band as the outfit delivering the best hits.
He said, “I always liked Deep Purple, and my favourite album of theirs is In Rock,” Iommi told Classic Rock in 2024. “It has one classic song after another. They always used to come up with great riffs, and ‘Speed King’ is hard to beat.”
Naturally, these two bands co-existed in the early part of the 1970s, pushing rock further into a darker, more menacing space. While they hated the label of ‘heavy metal’, there is simply no denying that both bands spearheaded the creation of the genre, for it simply hadn’t been heard until their emergence.
Sabbath were clearly happy for that to be the case, just pleased to be penning songs that hit the same marks as Deep Purple’s, but the feeling wasn’t exactly reciprocated. Deep Purple’s very own Ritchie Blackmore once went on a brutal tirade of comparisons, labelling the space they shared with Sabbath as frustrating, and ultimately a reminder of music fans’ inability to detect subtleties.
Ultimately, there are parts of Blackmore’s point that are correct. No two bands are exactly the same, and there is always sonic nuance. But let’s not act as though they aren’t shared properties between the pair, and in all honesty, there’s no harm in being compared to a band who laid down a track like paranoid.
