Hear Tony Iommi’s isolated guitar on the Black Sabbath song ‘Into The Void’
Very few many British bands are more significant than the West Midlands’ foremost hellraisers, Black Sabbath. The heaviest group on the planet when they first broke through at the turn of the 1970s, their pounding, ominous form of rock laid many of the critical foundations of the ubiquitous genre we all know as metal.
More atmospheric than anything out there at the time, going much further into the darkness than Iron Butterfly’s ‘In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida’ and more visceral than anything Jimi Hendrix wrote, the world could not believe what was happening when the four Brummies burst onto the scene with their songs about the occult, the supernatural and science fiction. This was the rock music of the future, and given that the quartet acutely understood humanity’s propensity to be frightened, they could take the world by storm.
At the time, the band also knew that their music was different, which only energised them more, despite guitarist Tony Iommi having a brief dalliance with Jethro Tull. The original lineup is undoubtedly their most revered, comprised of Iommi, frontman Ozzy Osbourne, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward, and their first handful of records, stretching from their 1970 self-titled debut to 1975’s Sabotage, remain as influential as ever.
Each played a key role in the machine, and without any of them, this early period would not have been so fruitful. It is safe to say that Sabbath gave rock the shot in the arm it needed, helping to raise the levels of all their contemporaries in the process.
One thing is also sure about Black Sabbath: Tony Iommi was the power that underpinned all of their greatness. Their only constant member, Iommi, was there through it all, and his powerful riffs made the group stand out.
His detuned, sludgy riffs allowed the band to tap into the dark side, with him quickly becoming hailed as the ‘Riffmaster’. It was via his fingers that the heavier side of modern metal guitar-playing came to fruition, a testament to just how iconic his sound is. Without Iommi’s work, you could say goodbye to the likes of Soundgarden, Queens of the Stone Age, Sleep and even Metallica, giving you a heavy dose of just how critical he’s been to the proliferation of rock music.
With many stellar cuts to his name, one of the most coveted is ‘Into the Void’ from 1971’s Master of Reality. The definitive proto-stoner rock cut, there’s no surprise that countless famed bands have covered it at different points. A pulsating number, luckily for us, Iommi’s isolated guitar track has been unearthed, meaning that you can take just how pioneering he was. It sounds remarkable, given the time and how vanilla a lot of the music his contemporaries were making. Stream the audio below.
