Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi recently sat down with Loudwire Nights to reflect on the band’s formative years. During the conversation, Iommi expressed no regrets about their early sound and noted how their association with religion helped them gain attention:
“It certainly brought everybody’s attention to it. So I think it was great. We did that. It was something very different. I didn’t even realize — I didn’t even think of it as anything like that. It just appealed to me when I played it. And it’s all. And we liked it. And then Ozzy came up with this melody line, and Geezer [Butler] wrote the lyrics for it, so everything just fitted in and it just sounded right. And that was our launch, really.”
He also reminisced about the challenges of promoting their music before the internet era:
“But, of course, in those days, there was no MTV and all that sort of stuff, and no Internet. It was word of mouth, so you really did have to go and play at these places and build up a reputation — either a good reputation or a bad one, whichever way it went — but you had to physically… If it had been Internet in those days, who knows what would have happened? Or MTV.”
The Making of ‘Black Sabbath’
Black Sabbath’s self-titled album, released 54 years ago, remains one of their most iconic works. In 2021, Iommi discussed the creation of the song ‘Black Sabbath’ on the ‘Backstaged: The Devil In Metal’ podcast. He recalled:
“One day we were in the rehearsal room and I started playing, as I did, ideas and this riff came out and I thought, ‘God.’ I really liked it and the other guys said, ‘Ah, that’s really good. We really like that.’ So, I put more to it and that was it, it became ‘Black Sabbath’. We built it up, but that was immediate — once we’d done that song, that was the direction and we knew where we were going then from that first riff. It just gave us a certain feeling.”
