What was the best-selling Black Sabbath song?
Black Sabbath are one of the biggest rock bands to ever grace the stage, as well as complete and utter pioneers of the heavy metal brand – but surprisingly, their singles sales records tell a pretty patchy story. Ozzy Osbourne and Co could shift copies in the album charts, sure, but when it came to lifting the load on individual songs, it turned out to be a much heavier weight to carry.
Of course, this is far from a total indictment of the band, because you can never diminish the impact that they have had on the canon of rock as a whole, but it is a rather unusual state of affairs. Usually, audiences will grab on to the one or two songs they most resonate with, and the rest of the body of work gets left to the wayside. But Black Sabbath were the complete opposite – the albums would sell in their millions, meanwhile, the individual single releases became the runt of the pack.
Yet it was the peak of the Sabbath discography that naturally also held the prize for its most successful slew of singles. Their sophomore record, Paranoid, released in 1971, is well-known for being their best-selling album, but this was massively buoyed by its singles storming the sales realm, an occurrence that oddly didn’t remain common to the rest of their back catalogue.
Subsequently, it was a toss up between the album’s namesake song ‘Paranoid’ and its follow-up ‘Iron Man’ for taking the title of Sabbath’s most successful single, with the former shifting over 1.7 million copies in physical sales, and both tunes collectively racking up in the region of five million digital sales units together. However, as much as those songs sailed to the top of the tree, there was still a strange translation when it came to their success in the charts.
How well did Black Sabbath do in the singles charts?
Despite it being their best-selling single, and indeed one of their most well-known songs as a whole, ‘Paranoid’ didn’t fare quite as epic a fate at the time of its release as its legacy would lead you to believe. In fact, although it reached number four in the UK charts, it marked Black Sabbath’s only top ten hit in single form, which is actually quite the remarkable feat, if you think about it. But even worse than that, it barely made a dent in the charts at all across the pond, hauling itself to number 61 at best.
Similarly, although ‘Iron Man’ is considered one of the greatest metal exports, and indeed one of the best songs of all time, its performance in the charts alone might have led you to think otherwise. It became their most successful single in the US, but when you realise that this was at number 52, it suddenly seems a lot less impressive. Black Sabbath clearly weren’t a band that made an impact in isolation – it needed a whole album’s backup in order for them to rise to the top.
Perhaps it is fitting, after all, that they called Osbourne the Prince of Darkness. He’s the frontman you would never expect to make it – in more ways than one – but if his band’s sales figures are anything to go by, he proves you can eventually make it to the top despite everything seemingly conspiring against you. That’s evidently the motto he’s taking into the upcoming farewell gig, because if anyone should go out with a bang, it should be him.
