The classic Black Sabbath anthem Tony Iommi thought was overrated
Tony Iommi was becoming one hell of a guitar player when it seemed like his world started crumbling. The perils of working in a sheet metal factory are pretty relentless.
Working on a factory floor in 1960s Britain was pretty common. The country was still licking its wounds from the war, and that meant the economy wasn’t exactly thriving. People worked whatever jobs were available, and those jobs seemed not to have much progression available. As such, a lot of people found themselves working in factories, and one of those people was the would-be Black Sabbath certified shredder.
Just as Sabbath were starting to make a name for themselves and it was beginning to look like the band might have some success in the musical world, disaster struck, as a big slab from the sheet metal factory landed on his fingers and cut them off. I’m not sure if you reading this play the guitar or not, but take it from a pro like me, your fingers are pretty essential.
“I don’t know what happened. I must have pushed my hand in. Bang!” said Iommi, recalling the harrowing event, “It came down. It just took the ends off [my fingers]. I actually pulled them off. As I pulled my hand back, it sort of pulled them off. It was left with two stalks, the bone was sticking out the top of the finger.”
When you look at the legacy that is Black Sabbath, you become subject to a range of different lineups and creative styles. Different members have come and gone, and the band has homed a host of lead singers; however, the constant which has always been there is Iommi. Arguably, there is no one with a better knowledge of the music of Black Sabbath, so if you want to know what their most authentic music and their most overrated music is, look no further than the comments of Iommi.
When it comes to the track which Iommi believes to be overrated, you might be somewhat surprised by his comments, as it’s one of Sabbath’s biggest songs. ‘Paranoid’ is a timeless heavy metal hit, as it’s a tune which is instantly recognisable from the moment you hear it. Who stumbles upon that opening riff and doesn’t immediately set aside everything they’re doing in order to listen.
It’s not that Iommi doesn’t like the song, but he doesn’t think it’s the best representation of Black Sabbath. Rather than being an extended ode to heavy metal, it’s a quick three-minute burst, and he believes that if it weren’t such a radio-friendly hit, it might not have become as huge a tune as we know it now.
“I always relate to ‘Black Sabbath’ and ‘Iron Man’,” he said when discussing some of his favourite Sabbath tunes, “A lot of people say ‘Paranoid’, but the song was written as a filler for the album – it was never intended on being anything else. But it became a single because it was a short song, and because it became what it did, most people knew us because of ‘Paranoid’ in them days.”
It’s true that the song was written for filler. When the band were putting together their second album, they needed to fill three minutes, and so during a lunch break, Iommi came up with that iconic riff. From that point on, the song basically wrote itself. You can understand why Sabbath didn’t feel particularly close to it at the time given it was such a deviation from their other material, but it was evidently a classic, hence why it became the album’s title track and Sabbath’s most successful tune. Overrated in the eyes of Iommi, maybe, but beloved in the ears of metal fans around the world.
