Black Sabbath: “We wanted to create a vibe, so we rehearsed in the dungeons”

To celebrate the incredible life and reassuringly heavy music of Ozzy Osbourne, we revisit a classic Black Sabbath interview from the July 2014 issue of Uncut (Take 206). Riding high on the success of their chart-topping reunion album 13, Ozzy, Tommy and Geezer took us through the formidable Sabbath cannon, album-by-album.

Ozzy Osbourne is in high spirits as he calls from Los Angeles. “I’m having the time of my life,” he says, revelling in the success that has greeted the reformation of the classic Black Sabbath lineup for a new album and tour. “We’re having a fucking blast,” he adds. “We played the Hollywood Bowl last Sunday. The last time we played there it was a fucking disaster. It was 42 years ago: we had to cut the show short because we were all going to pass out from drug overdoses.”

BLACK SABBATH
Vertigo, 1970
The black and blues. The newly christened Sabbath rock out, pretty much live.

OZZY OSBOURNE: We were made by Jim Simpson… he used to have a club, Henry’s Blues House. We used to carry our equipment around in case someone didn’t turn up, and say, “We’ll play”. We started off as a blues/jazz band like Ten Years After, or Jethro Tull: the hip crowd.
TONY IOMMI: “Black Sabbath” was the second song we’d written, so we called ourselves that.
GEEZER BUTLER: The first time we played “Black Sabbath” was in this tiny pub in Lichfield near Brum. The whole pub went mental.
OZZY: The first one was a live album with no audience. The manager said, go to this place Regent Sound… we’d never been into a studio before. We did the album in about 12 hours and then went to do a residency in Switzerland…
GEEZER: [Producer] Rodger Bain was like a fifth member of the band. We’d been to six different record companies and producers, and they’d all told us, “Come back when you can write proper music.” Rodger was the first person on the business side who understood what we were trying to do. He just said, “Play what you do live.”
OZZY: When we come back from Switzerland, Jim said, “Come in and I’ll play you your finished album.” It had a gatefold sleeve and started with all this thunder and lightning – it blew my mind.
GEEZER: I loved the cover – but I didn’t like the inverted cross on the inside. It was the first time we’d had something to take to our parents and show we were doing something constructive.

PARANOID
Vertigo, 1971
The classic second album. An apogee of Iommi riffing, a whiff of Satan, and a hit single, too…

OZZY: Paranoid went from four tracks to 16 tracks. 16 tracks! The temptation was to fuck around with effects: we thought we were Pink Floyd meets The Beatles meets acid, y’know?
TONY: There was no-one doing this sort of thing. A lot of people were honestly frightened of us in the early days. We weren’t allowed to do interviews either, which made it more interesting in some ways. The image was built up by people talking… this satanic sort of thing.
GEEZER: We’d written “War Pigs” already. It was called “Walpurgis” back then. When the label wanted to know what the next LP would be called, we said we’d got a song called “Walpurgis” and we wanted to call it that. They said, “What does that mean?” And we said, “It’s Satan’s Christmas.” They said, “No, thank you.”
TONY: You get labelled as a black magic band and all that rubbish, but it was a more about what was going on in the world. “War Pigs” came up when we were playing at this club in Zurich and we had to play seven 45-minute spots a day. We hadn’t got enough songs, so we used to just make stuff up. And “War Pigs” was one of the things I just made up. Gradually, through the six weeks we were at the club, it took shape and we ended up with the song.
GEEZER: The very last thing we did in he studio was “Paranoid” – we had three minutes to fill for it to be a legal album. Tony wrote the riff, I quickly did the lyrics. Then the record company heard it and changed the whole title to Paranoid.
TONY: The album wasn’t long enough, and that’s how “Paranoid” came about. We’d never written a two-and-a-half minute song. I started picking around, had it in a couple of minutes, we learnt it and recorded it. I didn’t think for a minute it was going to be a hit.
GEEZER: After Top Of The Pops, we were getting teenage girls coming to the gigs. They were climbing onstage and molesting us while we played. That was the good part. But we knew that if we carried on like that, we’d just be another pop band. So we said, “No more singles.”
OZZY: I could afford to have a bath and put some smelly stuff on. It was just a great period of my life. The early days are always the best. I remember being in a club in Birmingham and posing around like the new child of rock, then the manager comes up to me and says, “Your album’s going in the charts at 17 next week.” I said, “Pull the other one!”

MASTER OF REALITY
Vertigo, 1971
The band’s last with Rodger Bain. Slow, heavy – a downtuned stoner’s choice.

TONY: We had to come up with stuff on the spot – we’d been touring so much on the Paranoid album, by the time we’d got to the studio we’d not had much time to come up with stuff.
OZZY: By that time, we were all so stoned I can’t really remember it. People often say to me, what advice would you give to young bands? I always say write as much shit as you can. If you get a hit – you’ve then never got enough time to write any stuff.
GEEZER: We were all doped out of our heads by then. That’s how we formed. When I first met Tony and Bill, Bill asked me, “Do you know where I can get any dope?” and I said, “It just so happens I’ve got a big lump of it in my pocket.”
TONY: Ever since I had my finger accident, I’ve had to experiment to develop things. So downtuning was another example of that. I went through a period of trying different tunings. It was a bit of a breakthrough.
GEEZER: The third album took us about 10 days to record. I thought it was the heaviest album we’d done so far. We knew we were accepted: we were big in the States, big in the UK. It just gave us more confidence.
OZZY: We used to smoke dope before we became successful – a five-bob deal, and we’d just go behind the shed and smoke a joint. But we all tried to stay away from heroin, cocaine and all that.

VOLUME 4
Vertigo, 1972
The band set up shop in America. Contains the mighty “Supernaut” and scenes of drug use.

TONY: We’d moved out to California. We had all the gear set up in the bar and we just had a great time playing and doing lots of coke. It was very much influenced by the coke.
GEEZER: It was a bit nuts at the house. We had all these mad fights with hoses and stuff. It was the first time we’d all lived together, and the first time we’d got into cocaine.
OZZY: Drugs became a part of Sabbath. We had the Egon Ronay map of cocaine dealers.
GEEZER: It was all the top dealers we were getting, so they’d come with bodyguards, armed with machine guns. They’d come up with these soap powder boxes filled with cocaine.
OZZY: We were originally going to call that album ‘Snowblind’ – if you look in the sleeve you can see we thank the “COKE-Cola company of Los Angeles”. People think it was a spelling mistake. I look back on it, and say, “Why am I still alive?” When you write on cocaine, you think everything you write is magic, but there was so much of that shit we never used.

SABBATH BLOODY SABBATH
World Wide Artists, 1973
The band stretch scaly wings: castles, funk, riffs… Rick Wakeman!

TONY: We’d done the same thing – we went to the same house, the same studio, but it just wasn’t working out.
GEEZER: We thought it might be the end. We got to LA, and they’d changed the studio. Stevie Wonder had bought half of the studio and put a synth in there. What you do on your laptop now took a whole studio then.
TONY: We ended up starting again in England. We went to Clearwell Castle in Wales. We wanted to create a vibe, so we rehearsed in the dungeons.
OZZY: We used to play tricks on each other, and pretend the castle was haunted. We’d have a few beers and then plant a bug in someone’s room and start making noises, like fucking schoolkids.
GEEZER: Tony said, “Let’s give it one more try.” And he came out with the “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” riff, and we just went, “Yes!” We stretched ourselves a bit on that one… we needed to. We’d learned a lot more musically. Rick Wakeman’s on it.
OZZY: In my opinion we should have folded after that. By this time, we’d realised the manager was ripping us off: we had lawsuits, and people serving us. That was our last joint effort.

SABOTAGE
NEMS, 1975
A legal matter, baby. Great album, marred completely by m’learned friends.

TONY: It was a funny period for us. We had a lot of legal trouble: we were switching over from being managed by Patrick Meehan. In the court in the day and at night in the studio. The frustration came out in the music: we had a track called “The Writ”.
OZZY: By Sabotage we had proof we were being ripped off. Every quid he gave us, he had 20,000 himself. I remember us doing a tour for God knows how many months and he gave us a £1000 cheque. If you’ve never had £1000, you go, “Wow! A grand!”
GEEZER: One day he said I can’t write you any cheques, there’s no money in the bank – I’ve put it all “in Jersey” for you. Then we got the tax bill for the money he’d taken. So we’d not only lost the money, we had to pay the tax on money we didn’t have. Then we found out all our houses were in his name.
OZZY: I remember him saying to me one day, “Do you know how much I’m worth, Ozzy? Eight million pounds.” That was a lot of money. I should have said, “Most of that’s ours, you cunt.”
GEEZER: Dealing with the business side of things kind of ended the band from then on. Sabotage took 10 months to record – it wasn’t any fun any more. We were all turning to drugs and getting stoned the whole time. It was horrible. Luckily the tours still did incredibly well – so we made money off that.

TECHNICAL ECSTASY
Vertigo, 1976
Recorded at Criterion in Miami, scaring the Eagles along the way.

OZZY: We tried to march forward but we didn’t know how. We’d been beaten up by our own drug abuse and alcoholism, and the music was paying off our tax demands.
GEEZER: It was getting harder and harder to come up with something new and different. It’s not like now: if you’re a heavy metal band, you put out a heavy metal album. Back then, you had to at least try to be modern and keep up. Punk was massive and we felt that our time had come and gone.
TONY: It was the first time that we asked a keyboard player to join us: Gerald Woodroffe. Then we shipped all the stuff to Florida and recorded it. The Eagles were recording next door, but we were too loud for them – it kept coming through the wall into their sessions.
GEEZER: Before we could even start recording we had to scrape all the cocaine out of the mixing board. I think they’d left about a pound of cocaine in the board. But we we had a good laugh on that album.
TONY: It was like paradise there. You’d be on the beach and you’d say, “Are you coming down the studio?” and they’d say, “In a couple of hours.”
GEEZER: The nearest pub was a strip bar: a lot of old blokes with dirty macs on hanging around outside in the 90° Florida heat. It was walking distance from the studio so we’d go down and have a beer. There’d be completely nude women dancing in front of you. It seemed quite weird to us. That’s where “Dirty Women” came from.

NEVER SAY DIE
Vertigo, 1978
Winter is coming. Ozzy returns, to a freezing reception.

GEEZER: It should have been called Say Die. Ozzy quit, we got in this other singer, Dave Walker, who wasn’t the right choice for the band. We’d booked this studio in Toronto, The Stones had just done their album there and were saying it was the best place in the world, so we thought maybe that would inspire us.
TONY: Ozzy came back but wouldn’t sing any of the songs we’d done with Dave Walker. So we had to go to Toronto with no songs. We had to hire a cinema, freezing cold in the winter, to write songs to record that night.
OZZY: We wrote the songs up where the screen was. Yeah, you really want to get into some heavy metal at nine in the morning.
GEEZER: The label had given up on us. The first night in Toronto we went into this restaurant and no-one had any cash. I’d brought $20, and paid for the food. We had one cent left and left it for the waiter. He chased us down the street.
TONY: I’m amazed we managed to pull anything out of the hat. With “Never Say Die” we ended up on Top Of The Pops, something we never thought we’d do again. But the writing was on the wall for the band. Ozzy just lost interest.
OZZY: When I was sacked, I thought I’m gonna go back to the hotel room and have the biggest party for as long as I got the dough, and go back to the real world. Then along the way Sharon comes along and says, “We want to manage you.” I said, “You want to manage me?” And she said, “We believe in you.”

13
Vertigo, 2013
It is risen! Rick Rubin reconnects Sabbath with its younger self.

GEEZER: We did have a few worries at first. But the difference between this time and the last time we tried to do an LP in 2001 was that Tony had about 80 riffs written. So it gave us a great starting point. When we met with Rick Rubin he gave us the direction.
OZZY: I’ve known Rick for many years and every time I see him, he says, “If you do a Sabbath album with the original guys, I want to be the producer.” So he says to me, “I don’t want you to think about heavy metal.” And I said, “What the fuck are you talking about? We invented it!”
TONY: Rick wanted to go back to the basics of the raw sound, with few overdubs. We were up for a go at that, but it’s hard to go back when you’ve tried to get a new sound going.
OZZY: We’d say, “We’re just warming up.” He’d say, “That’s what I’m after!” One time I wasn’t even singing words, just filling the holes – that’s what ended up on the album. He used ProTools like we used to use a four-track – he didn’t load it up with fake effects. What you get is what we played, with just a few overdubs. He captured the spirit of early Sabbath.