"The first record to turn me on was She Loves You." "And then I wanted to be a Beatle, but I ended up being in Black Sabbath!" "The music is very honest." "What you see is what you get with our music." "And it was a very basic, you know, hard-hitting sound." "The stuff that we were writing was valid and was in the right direction." "Because it was done live, without any trendy effects or anything - there wasn't any back then - it still stands up, because it's like listening to a live band." "It was just like, "Put it down there, play your hearts out," ""play everything you've got, and just put it onto a piece of tape."" "It's this tough, resilient music." "You know, you can dip it underwater, and like an AK47, it still works." "They're one of the original great British bands." "You know - the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Sabbath and Led Zeppelin." "Five bands that totally shape British rock and roll in America." "You have songs like Paranoid, and War Pigs, and Iron Man." "These songs, if you look back, this was like the blueprint for what this band was, and what they would be." "The fans turn up in their tens of thousands to see metal, still." "And Paranoid is an album that doesn't date." "Paranoid is a defining moment in metal and rock." "First time I ever played with the four of us..." "I can't remember, but it must have been Henry's Blues House, which was run by our manager at the time, Jim Simpson." "We had all this energy banging around, we had... this band that we all five of us believed in." "We knew it was a good band, we knew it was better than most, we knew we had something special." "But we hadn't got a direction." "Well, it was all 12-bar blues..." "Every Tuesday night we'd go to this place and just... we'd all, like, grow our hair long and, you know, and just have a couple of pints, and just do 12-bar blues." "So every song was either... ..or..." "So, you know." "They were all fairly straightforward." "The first time I came across them, they were a band called Earth." "It was just booked into the studio, you know, as a demo session, and they came in, in their sort of scruffy way." "And Ozzy didn't have any shoes." "We'd show up for a gig and most of the time people would turn us away cos they wouldn't let us in the door." "I've got no shoes on my feet, my arse is hanging out of my pants, and I'm pissed, and smoking Woodbines." "We'd been worrying, pontificating... draining our brains for weeks trying to get a new name." "We knew Earth wasn't right, we had to get a new name, and we always found good reason for not accepting any of the proposed names." "At the time, I was heavily into the occult and stuff." "Not Satan, or anything, just..." "Learning about astral planing and all that cobblers." "I suggested, among other things, Black Sabbath." "Everyone went, "Oh, yeah!" "That's a good name."" "Suddenly, when the Black Sabbath name came, and the songs that backed up the Black Sabbath name came, we had a package which made sense." "The first song we wrote was actually Wicked World." "And then the second song was Black Sabbath." "All the songs were written basically the same." "We'd go into a rehearsal room, with nothing." "And then just start jamming about..." "It's peculiar how it all happened, because they came one after another, without having to sit there going," ""Oh, I don't know, I can't think of anything."" "They were just coming out..." "It was almost like a magical force pushing these things out, that we didn't understand." "I was a medium-sized fan of Holst's The Planets suite, particularly Mars in those days." "And one of the days... we were rehearsing, and I was going..." "Trying to play Mars." "And then the next day, Tony went in and went..." "And that's how Black Sabbath came about." "Which was so different to anything else we'd heard." "I just knew it was something." "When I started playing it, your hairs on your arm stand up." "I thought, "This is really different."" "And everybody said, "God, that's really different."" "Then when the other guys started playing with it, it made it into what it is." "When Oz sang, "What is this that stands before me", it became completely different." "Because it hadn't been quite said like that." "And this was a different lyric now, this was a different feel." "You know, I was playing drums to the words." "We were wondering what to call it, cos it doesn't actually say the lyrics "black sabbath" in the song." "So, "The band's called Black Sabbath, just call it Black Sabbath."" "And that was it." "It almost defines heavy metal, doesn't it?" "I mean, how many people have used that kind of... that kind of tonality, within other songs?" "Sabbath did an awful lot of road-work in the early days." "When they weren't playing up North, they went across to Hamburg, played the Star Club..." "And like a lot of British bands from their generation, that really was the place where they got their chops down, and they really developed a way of playing together." "The Star Club was famous because of the Beatles, so when we got the opportunity to play at the Star Club we went, "Yeah, the Star Club!" "Fantastic!"" "And of course the reality was a lot different." "We got there, and there was about three people in the audience." "One of 'em being probably a nut-case, and one a prostitute, and, "Could we start at two o' clock in the afternoon?"" "It was, like, eight different 45-minute sets." "We'd stretch each..." " and we only had, like, eight songs at the time - so we'd stretch each song out for 45 minutes." "And because we were jamming so much, that's where we wrote practically all the first album, and some of the second album." "I think you can hear a lot of the blues, which was typical of the day." "Especially with some of the drumming, you know, and the way that Terry's playing some of his bass notes." "But Tony's just..." "He's off the hook, man." "Tony's..." "He's already off the edge of the world, somewhere." "When you play that rigorously all the time, then it's going to get tighter and tighter." "And Jim Simpson eventually got them a deal with..." "I think Vertigo Records, and an album produced by Rodger Bain." "There is this kind of received myth that they turn up, make their first album in a 12-hour session for 800 quid or whatever it is." "But by then, they were a really well-drilled machine." "We were going to the ferry." "Manager says, "Go and record those songs." "You can mess around with them," ""cos I've got you a deal on Vertigo."" "And just to have a deal was like, "Wow," you know?" "They booked two days, 10am till 10pm for recording, and two days, 10 till 6, for mixing." "It was literally live in the studio." "Rodger Bain, I think he's a genius." "The way he captured the band in such a short time." "He was very easy-going, but he knew exactly what he wanted to do." "Cos he'd seen them live, and he wanted it to sound like that." "We weren't really involved in it." "All we done was went in and played." "Cos we didn't know anything..." "We didn't know what was what in the studio, at all." "We didn't know what mixing was, so we weren't allowed on the mix anyway." "It was left all up to him and Tom Allom." "And we literally just went in, played live," "Tony did a couple of guitar overdubs..." "We had to do it quick, anyway." "Not only from their point of view, but we'd got a gig in Germany!" "So we had to get on the boat and all that rubbish straight after the recording session." "We literally didn't think anything of it once we'd recorded it." "We'd done..." "To us, that was it." "That's as far as we wanted to go." "None of us had any idea what was laying before us." "Cos everybody told us that we'd never do anything, that we were wasting our time and should get a proper job." "All we wanted was to have this record that we could go," ""There you go, Mum and Dad." "We've done it." "We've made an album."" "It wasn't until we got back from Europe that we realised the album was in the charts." "Listening to the countdown and the guy says, "Black Sabbath!"" "We went, "What?"" "We thought, "Is there two Black Sabbaths or something?"" "I got my first royalty advance of one hundred and five quid, and I thought I'd never, ever see that in my life." "I mean, I was like, "What?"" "I gave my mum a fiver, got pissed on the rest!" "Bought a pair of shoes, and some Brut smelly stuff." "We'd slogged and slogged away, and got nowhere." "Suddenly, the world had taken notice." "Here they were, wanting another album." "What we were doing, we were writing and doing 'em live." "We'd put a new song in when we wrote one, so we'd road-tested them, and stage-tested them." "Although we were singing different lyrics, probably." "Paranoid was developed on the road." "Rehearsing before gigs, soundchecks." "We used to write songs in the van going to the gig." "Get to the gig, I would sing any old shit, you know, as long as it had a melody." "Whatever Sabbath did, I think it was... 99% of it was from the gut." "And maybe 1 % was thought about." "But not for long." "My ideas just sort of seemed to come out of the blue." "You'd be like, "Yeah, we want to make this a medium tempo song,"" "or whatever, and then I'd come up with a riff for that." "He had the guitar, he had the incredible knack of... just coming out with riff, after riff, after riff." "I don't know why, that was the magic of the band." "He'd come out with a riff, and we'd all play the same thing, all at the same time, together, as if we all knew exactly what was coming next." "It's something about it, you know." "It's a chemistry." "Everybody'd wait till I'd start coming up with something, or Bill might start something, or Geezer, or... whoever started something that we thought, "That's good."" "It was still jamming, but it was becoming more... more as a team writing." "And then Ozzy would start singing something about his aunt, or whatever it might be, just a load of anything." "Make words up." "Just to get some kind of melody line." "And then once that was sorted, then Geezer would write all the lyrics, generally." "I mean, Ozzy..." "He'd add some of Ozzy's lyrics, depending on what they were." "And without any one of us, it wouldn't have been the same, so we all, you know, got credit for it." "It was more like writing heavy rock musical pieces." "War Pigs, in fact, came from one of those jams, in one of the clubs." "During the song Warning, we used to jam that out, and... that particular night we were jamming it out, and Tony just went..." "And... "Ah, that's good."" "Originally that was going to be called Walpurgis." "Something to do with black magic, cos we'd all started reading Dennis Wheatley books." "Basically, War Pigs is a Hieronymus Bosch painting, brought to life." "It's significant that in America, there was a very political label called Broadside Records." "This is where Dylan tested his lyrics out under another name." "This is where the great civil rights protesters like Joan Baez, Tom Paxton, Phil Ochs, all cut their teeth, and issued recordings on Broadside." "They were very, very sniffy when American bands started to... talk protest about war." "Very, very sniffy." "What's the one song that they rate?" "War Pigs." "Lester Bangs was absolutely on the money when he called them "the Milton of rock and roll."" "Milton was this hyper-moralist, also, and concerned with good and evil." "I wanted to write a song called Walpurgis." "You know, the satanic version of Christmas." "Write it about, that Satan isn't a spiritual thing, it's warmongers." "That's who the real satanists are, all these people that are running the banks and the world, trying to get the working class to fight their wars for them." "And we sent it off to the record company..." ""No." "Not going to call it that." "Too satanic."" "So I changed it to War Pigs." "No one has ever been able to duplicate that organic thing that they did." "I mean, the way that Tony would approach a solo." "When it gets to the solo, I try to always..." "like, as the beginning, try and keep the bottom string ringing, so it fills it out nicely." "And in the final mix, we added a second guitar, which you'll hear now." "Geezer's really thundering away underneath, listen." "Geezer's great." "I mean, he's..." "Again, bass players don't seem to exist like that, that actually play, instead of playing one note." "He'd be playing all over the place, and bending the strings..." "And that's what we got into." "On the riffs and stuff, I'd bend the strings and Geezer'd bend the strings, so we'd play that to make it bigger, to make it a wider sound." "Tony's riffs were so, like... so much feeling in those riffs, and so much menace and everything else." "You wanted to capture what he was doing musically, lyrically." "There is this thing in what he does, that is really - it's not just him, it's the band as a whole, the dynamic in the band - but the riffs that drive it are just like no other guitar player." "Iron Man." "You know..." "The guitar's not trying to do anything tasteful." "He's using it cos he can bend it, because he can... effect feedback and make this droning sound which is... a killer hook." "What started the whole thing off with that..." "I'd done this... something sort of like a monster, real plodding, and real evil." "And I came up with this by hitting the two strings." "And that sort of caused this vibe, of..." "And I wanted a riff to go with that." "I remember me and Ozzy were walking down the road one day, and Tony had just come up with the Iron Man riff." "And Ozzy was going, "What are we going to call it?"" "And I think he just came out with, like," ""Sounds like a big iron bloke."" "Walking about..." "And I just said, "Yeah, that's a good title, Iron Bloke."" "Which developed into Iron Man." "I say, "I am Iron Man," but that's about as far as I did." "Cos what I would do, if I couldn't come up with a melody over the top of what Tony's riff was," "I'd sing the riff, with the song." "And Geezer wrote it about a guy that travels through time, and he sees what's going to happen in the future." "It's, like, a right sci-fi thing." "Geezer was always into that sci-fi shit." "I didn't even know what the word meant." "It was all about the future of the world." "I was really into pollution and all that cobblers, back then." "Hippy." "You could just see there were a lot of things going wrong in the world, and nobody was saying anything about it." "Bob Dylan had long since faded from the present memory." "And there was nobody talking about the stuff that I wanted to talk about." "Political stuff." "So, that's what inspired me." "Iron Man is a great story." "You know - revenge." "And when I heard that story, I'm like," ""Yeah, those jocks..." "Boy, if I came back as Iron Man," ""they'd respect me then." ""I've got to find a magnetic field!"" "I think we were only two days in Regent, doing the basic tracks." "They'd got all the material written, except I don't think they'd really written all the melodies and the lyrics." "It was just, "Come in," probably another two sessions, ten till ten and out we came with the basic tracks for the album." "We didn't bother to do any overdubs there, because we knew we were taking them to Island Studios, where they had a brand, spanking new 16-track machine." "Got the solo coming up here, with a nice speed change." "Let's listen to a bit of Tony on his own." "We'll put Geezer in here." "And Bill." "That rhythm section." "I cannot overemphasise how important that rhythm section is to the music, and to the way those albums sounded." "If you listen to Paranoid, the first time, if you're not an experienced listener, not a musician or whatever, it's all about that guitar and that crazy singer." "But you don't have any foundation to build upon, for a guitar player, unless you've got this rhythm section that can really hold that pocket." "There's a great moment on Iron Man - they do this descending bridge that shifts into an ascending bridge on a dime." "Listen to that one over and over again, then go in the band room and try and do that yourself, and you'll sprain your mind." "That is a great rhythm section, that can just turn that time around." "I have played that moment many times over, going, "Man, what a band."" "Everybody thinks to be a heavy rock band, you've got to have a loud guitar." "That's not the case." "It's the rhythm section." "You've got a good drummer and a good bass player working together, it gives the other band members room to move." "And then how they repeat the riff, the intro riff, as the band is galloping..." "It changes the context of the riff, so they actually re-invent the riff on the way out." "That's really cool songwriting, that's doing a lot with a little." "Cos it's a fairly simple song." "We always liked variation." "I think that's another Beatles influence, if you like." "Cos every album the Beatles did... none of the songs were the same." "There were all different, like, feels to each song." "We always tried to get that." "We didn't, like, do a heavy metal album from track one to track ten." "Planet Caravan was very different to anything what we'd done before." "And it was almost one of those, "Hmm, should we do this?"" "I must admit, when I first bought Paranoid and listened to it," "I was really disappointed that it had this mellow track, three tracks in." "I just wanted a bit more intense heavy metal." "I just started playing this riff, and then we thought, well... it was so quiet, and Bill liked it, everybody liked it." "So Bill just started joining in on the little congas he had." "So I just play..." "And that was basically the main part of the song, and we sort of played it through with Bill playing congas, and Ozzy singing." "We liked that, it was nice and relaxing." "Good to get stoned to." "So that's where it came in." "We got a guide vocal from Ozzy, which is, again, pretty much the final melody, but totally different lyrics." "We'd literally be jamming away, and he'd be jamming as well, singing along to everything, he was just..." "I don't think he gets enough credit for what a talent he had for coming out with these incredible vocal lines." "Just out of the air." "It's just..." "And it was almost always, what he'd first come up with, that's what we'd go with." "He was quite good at coming up with melodies, and I found, certainly with him, he was good at coming up with ballads as well." "You know, a good melody for a ballad." "A lot of the times he'd come out with one word, and I'd go "Yeah, that's good," and write the rest of the song around it." "Just came up with that in the studio, and it was really laid back, so we didn't want to come out with the usual love crap." "So it was about floating through the universe with your loved one." "Instead of, "Let's go down the pub and have some chips", or whatever." "That's what it's about, just taking a spaceship out into the stars, and having the ultimate romantic weekend." "Tony used to love Django Reinhardt and Joe Pass, and he used to play that a lot, which didn't really fit in with the heavier stuff, but it gave him a chance to, you know," "show what his roots were." "We just went into a little jazzy solo at the end." "Whatever it was." "When he first left school, he had a job in a factory, and he's left-handed, so..." "He cut the ends of his fingers off in a metal shearing machine." "The manager of the factory came to see me, and he brought me an EP at that time, and he said, you know," ""Play this", and I went "I don't want to listen, I'm not interested."" "He said to just put it on and play it, so I did." "And it was Django Reinhardt, I'd never heard of him at that point." "I thought his playing was great, and then this guy said," ""He's had an accident in another form and lost two fingers."" "And..." "It really got me going then, it really started me off." "You know, somebody's done this and managed to work with it." "Planet Caravan is not a riff-driven track, but that showcases his dexterity and versatility, as far as I'm concerned, and it's got this kind of ambient quality, which often does get overlooked in what Sabbath do," "cos everyone remembers all those huge riffs, and those are the characteristic tracks." "But there's a lot of subtlety in what he does." "These guys were still incredibly young kids, trying to find their way in the music scene." "Trying to refine their approach." "I think we all felt the anger." "There was a lot of riots going off everywhere." "Paris, America, there were students being shot." "We all realised, '67 and '68, revolution was never going to happen." "You know, it was just like... a dream." "It was like "back to reality" time." "Electric Funeral is a track that really has that sense of... an apocalyptic view of the world, if you will." "I think that aspect stems from the fact that" "Sabbath were aware of the world around them." "In the 1950s and '60s, there was paranoia about being nuked." "And you would see... ..propaganda films about what to do, particularly from America." "First, you duck." "Then you cover." "Here they are, on their way to school on a beautiful spring day." "But no matter where they go, or what they do, they always try to remember what to do if the atom bomb explodes right then." "It's a bomb!" "Duck, and cover!" "Ozzy was always great at interpreting..." "If he wrote them, or if I wrote the lyrics, it always sounded like it was coming from deep down in Ozzy's soul." "He'd just got such a great voice for putting over stuff like that, you know, menacing stuff." "Here's a good example of the vocal, the guitar and the bass all basically doing the same melody and riffing together." "Which is a great effect." "All the verses are like this." "None of the Sabbath songs off of Paranoid really followed, sort of, traditional songwriting kind of format." "I mean, there was never a verse, chorus, verse, bridge, solo out." "They never did that." "The other thing that they did was they'd jump into these tempo changes." "I think the tempo changes came from, as we were progressing on a song, sometimes we'd come up with a riff, then we wouldn't know where to take it afterwards." "So we'd go away and think about it, and we might write a completely different song in the meantime, and then go back to that particular song and just keep working and working on it, until we were all satisfied with where the main riff should go next." "Some days we'd come out with loads of ideas, so we'd try and tack everything on." "And whatever worked, that's what we'd keep." "That's what would end up as the final song." "Then we go into a completely different track, basically." "Let's check out what Bill's doing here on his own." "Then Geezer." "Then the riff." "The sound was very rooted in where we came from, it was an industrial town, and..." "And I think it had a lot to do with the actual creation of the things, you know, that we were singing, being involved with." "There was a lot of gangs around where we lived, and we didn't want to be a part of that." "We wanted to be, you know, into the music." "But I think it all slips into what you're writing, it's all a part that's subconsciously there, you know, for when you create songs and riffs." "It's that industrial, downer sort of rock, if you like." "The press's attitude to Black Sabbath was almost uniformly negative." "I don't think that anybody really understood, at that time, what the band were creating." "This kind of dark force of metal." "They described them on one occasion as," ""spending a day on the end of runway number one at Heathrow," ""four brickies on acid inviting you to eat rat salads."" "I suppose when you stack them up against their peers, such as Zeppelin or Deep Purple, Sabbath were the ugly sisters." "They were some sort of bastard children from deepest Aston in Birmingham." "Nobody ever gave us a good review, nobody ever gave the album a good review." "We liked it that way cos the more they hated us, the more the kids liked us." "They all slagged us to death, and..." "They're the ones that looked silly when the album sold so many, because they looked totally out of tune with everything." "To what the kids wanted." "So it made them look really stupid." "And a lot of them didn't ever forgive us for that." "But you just had to ignore that, you know, cos they just panned it, cos it was something they didn't understand, what we were doing." "Critics like hope." "The critics tend to be upper-middle class kids, who are liberals." "For want of a nastier term." "They want hope and Sabbath was not giving them hope." "I'll always remember we did these two American army bases, and it was where all the guys, once they'd finished their tour of Vietnam, instead of going straight back to America, they'd have to have like a half-way house." "And there was one in Germany and one in England." "Then we got talking to the soldiers and everything, and they were in a terrible state, telling me that a lot of them were doing heroin." "Nothing on the news about this, no programmes telling you that the US troops in Vietnam, to get through that horrible war, were, like, fixing up and all this kind of thing." "It just stuck in my head, and when we did Hand Of Doom, that's what I wrote it about." "On the Paranoid record, there's some real downer themes, but find the part of it that's not true." "It was an awful war." "And these young men did come home awfully twisted." "And heroin use, drug abuse and alcoholism ran rampant with these young men, who came home having seen stuff that no person should see or do." "And Sabbath addressed it." "Sabbath are not ones to preach." "They want us to maybe observe." "And they'll say, on a song like Hand Of Doom, they can sort of allude to the fact that if you go down a certain path, you know, drugwise, you will lose yourself." "But they also know that they are in grave danger of doing that at any given moment." "Hand Of Doom is one of my favourite songs." "To go with Terry's bass playing, I'm just playing rimshots." "And it literally is like something out of how we played when we were kids." "And I like the way that, again, with the lyrics, we are supporting it lyrically." "It's about listening, you know." "It's about listening to each other." "And not just ploughing through." "The vocal on Hand Of Doom, for me, is really classic Ozzy." "Really well-delivered, it's got the menace in it." "And it's brilliantly phrased and it just sounds spot-on to me." "You know, Hand Of Doom, he just got it, he captured that one particularly well, I think." "I like it, classy vocal." "He has his own sound and there isn't anybody in the fucking world that sounds anything like him." "I don't think he was conscious of his vocal style at that point, he was kind of fitting into the rhythms, fitting into the way Geezer wrote the lyrics." "It's very unconventional, I think, but ultimately very successful." "But I think it's a formula he stumbled upon, in typical Ozzy style, rather than finessed over the years." "I can't hardly read English, never mind music." "I don't know what key I sing in," "I don't know..." "But I've said to people I must learn to play an instrument, and people have gone to me, "You'd probably be making the biggest mistake," ""if you learned what it was all about, you'd probably lose what you already have."" "It was like a long instrumental part at the beginning, we sort of got carried away with it, you know, but we liked it." "I mean, it doesn't sort of happen so much these days, when people do like long intros, but that was what we tended to do on a song." "I think Tony Iommi, by the second album, has really developed this thing, that is completely unique." "And to this day, no one sounds like Tony Iommi." "Another key for the solo." "We'll have a little bit of Bill on his own, I think, yeah." "There he goes." "Nice triplets, and..." "But keeping the beat going." "Changing the time there." "Nice change." "Geezer Butler and Bill Ward swing!" "They really are incredible." "The more you listen to the Paranoid album, the more music comes out of it." "Fairies Wear Boots, it wasn't really about those creatures at the end of Ozzy's garden, that he kind of keeps out of one way." "It was the result of an encounter with a skinhead gang." "So Ozzy wrote the song Fairies Wear Boots about these skinheads, calling them fairies." "Cos they had, you know, the big Doc Marten boots on that they were kicking hell out of us with." "And that's where it came from." "Just a silly little lyric, you know." "It's fun, you know." "That's what Ozzy's lyrics were though, he'd think like of a thing, and then wanted to say something about skinheads are like fairies in boots." "And then like "How else am I going to finish it?"" "so he goes off on a totally different tangent." "About being stoned, or something." "It's about LSD, I think." "Cos we started to mess around with that kind of stuff." "In some sense, what they did was brought the hippy culture to the working class." "Things like smoking dope became really widespread." "If you drove up to a house party on a winter night, when it's too cold to stand outside, they're the four guys standing outside the house, on the front porch, drinking cold beer." "Cos either they can't get in to the party, or they don't want to be inside the party." "Those are your Black Sabbath fans." "The lonely stoners." "The ones who congregate and party in the woods, not at the dance." "That's a Black Sabbath fan." "Cos lyrically, it's potentially some down-and-out stuff, not, "Hey, let's all get together and dance to this!" Nah." "We'd sort of covered the side that nobody else was sort of..." "It was all love and peace, when we started, you know." "It was all the hippy stuff and flower power and whatnot, and we just came out with something that was really happening." "The Vietnam war and all the side of life that nobody was sort of mentioning." "The rest of Warner Bros didn't want to have anything to do with them." "You know, "Hey, what kind of music are we putting out here?" ""We're James Taylor, that's where we're going."" "So Black Sabbath was my band." "The Paranoid album was going to be called War Pigs." "So we had this cover done of a guy with a shield and a sword, to go with War Pigs, and they wouldn't let us use it, it was banned." "I think they were offended by War Pigs, you know." "And in America at the time, it's no wonder they were offended by it." "We did not want to do it." "We were in the midst of a war ourselves in this country, and what their reasoning was was not that important to me," "I knew we weren't gonna call it War Pigs." "We didn't have any say what so ever in album stuff." "It was on an acetate, and I remember playing it and turning the sound way up and shaking the whole building." "And people in our building would come and say, "What's that?"" "And I said, "I think that's the breakthrough album." "I don't understand it," ""but that Paranoid sounds like a great title for an album, and for a single."" "The one thing that stands out in my mind with that, was Rodger Bain saying to us," ""Look, we need four, five minutes, just go and jam something."" "We knew we had to fill three or four minutes, and that's all we were concerned." "We didn't go, "Oh, we've got to have a single."" "It was an afterthought, Paranoid." "So they just wanted a short song." "We'd never done a short song, it was always long, you know." "So we came back from the pub, back to the Regent Sound Studio," "Tony straps his guitar on and starts playing the opening to what is now Paranoid." "We're all looking around, and everybody's like scrambling," "I'm looking for my sticks." "I think it was about 20 minutes." "20 minutes to cook it up and basically have it ready." "We laid the track, Oz already had some ideas going on with melodies." "Ozzy's singing the final melody, but you'll hear the lyrics have actually got nothing to do with Paranoid at all." "It's pretty obvious he's just riffing it." "Just to get an idea for the melody in his head." "I don't think he's even singing off a lyric sheet," "I think he's just making them up as he goes along." "Even though Paranoid is a fairly pop-orientated song, it's still a really heavy song." "The subject matter's heavy." "You know, it's the emotion of paranoia that afflicts this guy." "I used to go through a lot of depression when I was a teenager, so that's where the lyrics from Paranoid came from." "Cos I couldn't relate to anybody when I was getting in my depressions." "The song Paranoid was released as a single." "It went flying up the charts, it was on every jukebox." "We were on Top Of The Pops, you know." "The album Paranoid went to number one when it was released." "It took us to America and it opened up... just fulfilled everything we'd ever dreamt of and all our ambitions." "They are completely the antithesis to, you know, the mainstream." "Simon  Garfunkel are number one." "Paranoid comes out, displaces Simon  Garfunkel." "I mean, that really is like chalk and cheese." "They came to the States, immediately the word started to spread, as they were playing in New York and some other places back there, in the eastern part." "And then they came out here, and they were an instant success." "This just went off, and it never stopped." "They achieved something that was their own." "And I think, you know, in 1969 through to 1978, they forged a career that is utterly unique." "History is always written by the winners." "And Sabbath won." "They created a genre." "We love you all!" "And a genre is never created at the time, it's only created when people follow you." "Any heavy rock band that I worked with after Sabbath, all were influenced by them." "It's timeless, you can put it on now and go," ""Wow, War Pigs, sure makes a lot of sense, when did they write that?"" ""Oh." "Still works."" "If you knew the key to the success of Paranoid and its longevity," "I think we'd all have Rolls-Royces parked outside." "There's some fifth element in there." "Something that just hooks you in." "It's real." "And I think anything from the heart, if anybody tells you the truth, or if anything comes from the heart, and you know it's heartfelt, it's real." "It's a very basic, honest album, you know." "It's how we felt, and people can relate to it." "Since that album came out, metal has just outlasted everything else." "Seems to be." "And a lot of new bands always refer back to that album." "We're just a lucky bunch of guys that got together, and something magical happened." "And there's no mystique about it, we didn't all get round our fiery cauldron, and throw dead mice in a pot, you know." "We did try it, but it didn't work."