The only Black Sabbath song to reach the top 10 in the UK
At the start of the 1970s, the arrival of Black Sabbath unofficially announced the birth of heavy metal. After being entrenched in the blues for most of the late ‘60s, these four lads from Birmingham turned in some of the most eerie music of all time, informed by the power of Ozzy Osbourne’s voice and the feral guitar riffs of Tony Iommi. But of course, something this scary doesn’t always translate into chart success.
While Sabbath may have had their crowd congregating towards something nasty, the most dangerous that the charts would ever get was The Rolling Stones, who were making their brand of nasty music with songs like ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. Though Mick Jagger made the idea of evil sound alluring, Sabbath spoke to the opposite side of the listener’s brain, making a primaeval noise impossible to turn away from.
As the legend goes, Sabbath was originally a blues rock band under the name Earth, but once Osbourne saw the phrase ‘Black Sabbath’ promoting a Boris Karloff movie, he thought of an idea for where the music could go. Instead of blowing people away with traditional means, why not make music intended to sound scary, just like horror movies are?
The band’s ascent may have begun with their debut, but ‘Paranoid’ was the only song that got traction on the singles charts. Written as a fluke when the band didn’t have enough material for their second album, Iommi came into the studio with a riff that he thought would work well for a catchy single.
Not having a name for most of the sessions, bassist Geezer Butler quickly wrote the lyrics regarding his struggles with depression. While the song was far shorter than the more epic pieces on their records like ‘War Pigs’ and ‘Iron Man’, it became a massive hit, with fans responding to something far nastier than the folk-rock clogging the charts around the same time.
That couldn’t get the song to number one, though, stalling at number four on the UK charts and hardly making a dent in the top ten in America. Despite their first major success in writing, Sabbath still had its own set of problems to deal with in the press.
While the fans may have liked Sabbath’s take on the subject, the critics were often ice cold, thinking that the band were the ugly antecedent of bands like Led Zeppelin. When talking about it years later, Butler remembered the first time he heard the term ‘heavy metal’ to describe their music was as an insult, telling Metal Evolution, “I read one review, and the guy said our show was like ‘a load of heavy metal being dropped’. Not musically whatsoever.”
Regardless of Sabbath’s influence on the singles market, they would become foundational to the next generation of rock bands, all brandishing guitars and wanting to play something heavier than they had heard before. Having an entire genre of untapped potential, Sabbath’s music kept up with the times, helping pave the way for doom metal, thrash metal and stoner rock over a decade. Black Sabbath will not get any awards for their singles prowess, but everyone from Metallica to Slipknot owes their careers to what they started.
