Fact #79317

BLACK SABBATH IN THE 1970s

NONE MORE BLACK

Compiled and researched by Johnny Black



6000 words, ORAL HISTORY with connecting paragraphs

The tale of the industrial accident which removed the tips of two of Tony Iommi’s fingers and, ironically, enabled him to create a whole new way of playing guitar, is so well-known that it needs no further elaboration here. Even so, it is sometimes overlooked that Iommi’s innovations as Black Sabbath’s axemeister were so radical, creating a previously unimagined blisteringly raw sound, that the music industry was simply incapable of perceiving the band as an act worth signing.

Jim Simpson (Sabbath’s first manager) : Sabbath came fully formed and created what we now know as heavy metal. I first met them in September 1968, when Ozzy and Tony became members of my blues club in Birmingham. Then, over the coming months, I watched their band go from writing blues to metal in the course of about a dozen songs.

Tony Iommi (guitarist, Black Sabbath) : It was very difficult doing what we did, because it was all soul clubs and blues clubs. We started playing blues, but the first time we threw in a couple of our own songs, Black Sabbath and Wicked World, people came up and said, ‘We really loved those two songs.’ We were well pleased.

After having their demos turned down flat by fourteen record labels, Simpson used his clout at EMI, who already had three of his bands, to wangle enough funding to record an album’s worth of material in mid-October at Regent Sound Studios in London with producer Rodger Bain.

Tony Iommi : We just went in the studio and done it in a day. It was just our live set and that was it. We actually thought a whole day was quite a long time. Then off we went the next day on the boat across the channel to play for £20 in Switzerland.

Jim Simpson : I didn't think they needed Roger Bain. His only masterstroke was that he added thunder and lightning to the start of the album, which gave it a great atmospheric opening.

Bill Ward (drummer, Black Sabbath) : I was bowled over at the time by the way Roger Bain looked. He wore Converse sneakers and so did I. It was nothing about what he’s done for records or his skills as a producer or anything else. It was literally something like, ’He looks pretty cool. All right.’

Geezer Butler (bassist, Black Sabbath) : Every producer we played to said, ‘You can’t have that sound - it’s a bass, not a bloody guitar!’ Roger Bain, the one producer who went, ‘Oh yeah, that’s a good sound,’ was the one who got the job.

When we recorded Black Sabbath, I had a 70-watt Laney guitar amp and a Park 4x12 cabinet with only three speakers in it - and two of them were wrecked! That’s how I got that really distorted sound. Actually, I hated the tone of that record at the time, but I’ve gotten used to it now. It’s nostalgic. I didn’t have any alternative; I couldn’t afford to buy new speakers.

We had only two days to record, so we just plugged in and performed our live set in the studio. We were allowed one take for each song and stopped only if someone made a horrible mistake. It was out of our hands. No time to dial in the perfect bass tone.

Tony Iommi : I suppose he had more knowledge of what was going on than we did because we didn't know anything about the studio in them days. We had never been in a studio as far as... We'd been in demo studios, but we'd never actually been in a proper studio to record an album, so he obviously had more knowledge than us, and he knew things that we didn't. He was helpful, he was alright. He was good at the time.

From what I can remember about it, it was very simplistic; a mike was stuck in front of the guitar cabinet, and then just the drums got miked up. That was it. I don't remember anything exotic.

We used a couple of effects on the album, but again, the guy that we had engineering at the time was Tom Allom. He was very good, so he helped a lot as well. He knew how to mike everything.

With the actual sound of the track, it seemed like it'd be good to have that (rain effect) on the beginning of it, so Rodger and Tom Allom did that.

I think they must've found some tape in the library, and used that. I don't think we were there when they actually did that.

Tom Allom (engineer) : I got a job as a recording engineer in a little recording studio in London.  The other engineer there knew me from a time where I did a holiday job at a studio that he had started out at.  He knew me and he knew that I was interested in tape recording and he said, “Do you want to have a crack at it?”  I said, “I’ll have a go at it.” 

It was a console that had twelve ins and four outs.  We had to persuade the boss to get a second four-track machine.  It was soon after that when we did the first Black Sabbath album. 

We did that with them using two four-tracks.  They were not in synch; we were bouncing from one to the other.  It wasn’t anywhere near as difficult to learn the ropes as it would be today in a full-fledged studio. 

At the same time, you had to learn to work with what you had.  You had to do an awful lot outside of what you had on the console.  We really didn’t have any outboard equipment.  It was really quite elementary. 

Microphone placements were very important in those days.   You couldn’t use a lot of heavy EQ, as we didn’t have it.  You had to get the blend right. 
The guitar sound is not quite what I would want to do now, as it is quite thin, but it does have a real energy to it. The drums are almost dry as a bone.  I remember we only had four mics for the drums.  Bill Ward played in this little drum booth in the corner of the studio.  They sound so real.  They were a fantastically good band; they were so tight. 

I started in the fall of 1968, so I had only been there for a year, if that.  It was baptism by fire.  I had no idea who Black Sabbath was when they came in. 

The first album was done in four days.  It was two sessions, from 10:00am to 10:00pm.  Can you imagine getting Black Sabbath up at 10:00am?  Those two sessions were for the recording.  Then, there were two sessions from 10:00am to 6:00pm for the mixing.

They recorded, essentially, all of the tracks on the first album beforehand.  I had done the demos when they were Earth; that was before they became Black Sabbath. 

I did the demos and then they came back about six months later.  When I did the demos, I was really new to the job.  Rodger Bain and I got along well. 

Tony Iommi : The idea was to make an album heavier than anything that had ever been heard before. We wanted to make something different. We had only bass, drums, guitar and vocals. We didn’t have keyboards or a rhythm guitarist. The idea was to make the sound as big as we could for what we’d got.

We were relying on (producer) Rodger Bain, because we’d never done a record before. It was very different for us to go into a studio with a producer. We knew nothing about recording. All we knew in those days was how to play the songs, like we did at gigs.
Because we only had a couple of days to do the whole album, it was hard for us because you only had one go at each song. There was no time to keep going over and over the songs. We had one try and that was it. I remember when we did Warning, it was quite a long track – when we used to do it on stage it was fifteen minutes – but when we recorded it we cocked it up a bit. I said, ‘Can we do it again?’ And Rodger said, ‘Well, okay you can do one more go at it.’ And that was it. We were like, Fucking hell! It was a bit nerve-wracking. In the end, Rodger edited it down a bit.

Geezer Butler : I’d moved into this flat that I'd painted black with inverted crosses everywhere. Ozzy gave me this 16th Century book about magic that he'd stolen from somewhere. I put it in the airing cupboard because I wasn't sure about it.

Later that night I woke up and saw this black shadow at the end of the bed. It was a horrible presence that frightened the life out of me! I ran to airing cupboard to throw the book out, but the book had disappeared. After that I gave up all that stuff. It scared me shitless. That's what the song's about. (ie title track of the album)

Tony Iommi : I used to like horror films and so did Geezer. I liked the power and the atmosphere in those films, and that had an impression on my writing. When you’re watching a horror film, that tingling sensation when something frightens you – I wanted to try to create that in music. The feeling in that song was something very different to anything I’d heard. It had a certain vibe about it when we played the riff all together. It had this really spooky feeling.

Geezer Butler : When we were invited to play Stonehenge on the Witches Sabbath on Walpurgis Night, we said 'No.' So the head bloody warlock cursed us and we had to go to this white witch and have the curse counter-acted. He said 'You have to start wearing crosses to keep the curse away' so Ozzy's dad made us these crosses and that was why we started wearing them in all the early photos.

Sabbath’s debut single, Evil Woman, was released on Jan 2, 1970 by Fontana Records. One of just two tracks on the album which had not been written by the band, this heavied-up re-interpretation of a lightweight pop-rock hit by Minneapolis-based blues-rock band Crow made little impact, either at radio or on the charts.

It was hardly surprising, then, that the Regent Sound recordings were rejected by all and sundry until, finally, the recently established Vertigo Records reluctantly took them aboard, but only because an unexpected gap had appeared in their release schedule.

Jim Simpson : They signed Black Sabbath as a makeweight because we had finished masters which could be delivered in a hurry.

Tony Iommi : We got a poxy £400 for signing, and a crap royalty rate, but we really weren’t bothered about the money, because we didn’t have any money anyway, we just wanted a record deal.

Readying themselves for the release of the album, Sabbath threw themselves back into live gigging, making their first appearance of the new decade on January 13, at Henry’s Blues House, Birmingham.

Jim Simpson : One thing I noticed early on was that their audience was almost entirely male. It was never fourteen year old girls.

And, instead of hip-shaking, the movement in the audience became more of a vertical thing. They were moving up and down, rather than side to side. The physical reaction to the music became involuntary. Nobody was showing off their fancy steps or trying to do something clever ... it was tribal.

Also, from the beginning, we had kids putting their heads inside the speaker cabinets. There was something heroic about Sabbath. It felt like a cause, and they were winning disciples over to that cause.

Jim Simpson : Sabbath had a great relationship with a local Birmingham company called Park, who made amplification, and who had a deal with Marshall. The relationship between Sabbath's equipment and their music was much more important than it was was for a ska band or a pop band. If Tony went out and saw someone with a stack of speakers that was taller than his, he would spit blood.



Their Debut LP, Black Sabbath, was released on Vertigo Records in the UK, on Feb 13, 1970. It peaked at No8 on the UK albums chart during a run of 42 weeks. It also reached No23 in Billboard in the USA.
Tony Iommi : We loved the idea of having an album out. We never knew for one minute what was going to happen with it, of course. It was just exciting to be able to do an album.

We were coming back from Europe when we heard that the album was in the top ten. Bloody hell! We were in shock.
It wasn’t nice to read the reviews. It’s your first album ever, and you get all the music magazines to see what’s been said about it, and then all you read is: ‘What a load of crap.’ I just went, 'Oh my God…'. It was hurtful at first, but you learn to live with it after a while. And the most important thing is, we believed in what we did, and that was the way life went for us, right from the beginning. We had to get over a lot of fences. I didn’t mind if a reviewer said, ‘It’s not my cup of tea, but a lot of kids do like it.’ But they said that nobody liked us. That was a little upsetting. But we just forged ahead. It’s the only way you can do it. You’ve got to believe in what you do. You can’t just fall apart because of what other people say.

Andy Partridge (songwriter, XTC) : I’d previously heard a lot of things described as heavy, such as Steppenwolf, but they paled into insignificance when I heard Black Sabbath. I bought that first album, and I’d never heard anything like it before. It had a demonic atmosphere but was also slightly comic. So I went to see them at McIlroy’s Ballroom in Swindon (May 28, 1970) and I thought they were great. I was in the early stages of learning guitar and I played along with every track on that album until I got them perfect.

Apr 4, 1970 : Sacrifice by satanic metal band Black Widow enters the UK singles chart, where it will peak at No32 during a run of just two weeks. Lurid tabloid newspaper stories engender confusion between Black Widow and Black Sabbath.
Tony Iommi : I think in one way it (the satanic image) helped us. At one point we weren’t doing any interviews, so nobody knew much about us. I heard stories about people being frightened to meet us. The image was good and bad, really. It created this thing and people wanted to come and see what we were like.
We were really interested in it (the occult), Geezer and I. Very interested in what it was like on the other side of life. We tried a Ouija board and frightened each other. I think in those days we were open to a lot of stuff. We were young and learning and trying to experience things.

Apr 5, 1970 : Black Sabbath play at the Lyceum Ballroom, The Strand, London, supported by Steamhammer and Gin House.
Tony Iommi : We weren’t a part of the London scene, because we couldn’t get gigs in London in the early days. The attitude was: if you weren’t from London you weren’t any good. But you have to turn your back on that and get on with what you do. I think it encourages you to fight back.

May 14, 1970 : Black Sabbath play at the Marquee Club, Soho, London, UK.
Tony Iommi : In the early days there was a rivalry between Sabbath and Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, but not a bad kind of rivalry. We weren’t horrible to each other. Deep Purple we really didn’t know, but we were friends with Zeppelin.

Jun 16, 1970 : Black Sabbath begin recording sessions for their second album, Paranoid, at Regent Sound Studios in London, UK. (Pre-production rehearsals had been carried out at Rockfield Studios, Monmouth, Wales.)
Rodger Bain (producer) : We did the backing tracks in the same place that we did the first album – Regent Sound, a little four-track just off Tottenham Court Road in the West End. It was a good-sounding studio, we always got good results in that room. It was an absolute shit-hole, but it worked!


Tom Allom (engineer) : On the second album, we did the tracks in the same studio (Regent Sound) and then we took the tapes to Island Studios and transferred them all up to eight-track. 

We didn’t do much in the way of overdubs.  It was still very much the basic tracks that formed the album. 

We captured a new sound and Rodger Bain, who was the producer, has to take credit for that.  He really did understand the way it should sound.  I had never seen the band live.  Rodger was a very intuitive producer and he never got anywhere enough credit for what he did.  There was just something about it.  I can’t say that we did this, or we did that, it just happened.  

I would not think the whole thing took more than ten days.

Tony Iommi : For the intro (to Iron Man), I wanted something that sounded really horrible.

Bill Ward : We were all going to the same place at the same time, and that was one of the key marks that we had recognizable as Sabbath music, which is actually the opposite of what Led Zeppelin were doing: They use air as a sound.

Ozzy Osbourne : We started Paranoid at Regent Sound and then we moved to this magnificent 16-track, Island Studios. That's where we wrote the song Paranoid.

Tony Iommi : The producer said, ‘We haven’t got enough songs. We need another three minutes.’ So Paranoid was made up there and then. It was just a throwaway thing. While everybody popped out for a bite to eat, I came up with this riff. I played it to the others and we laid it down. And that was it.

Tony Iommi : Having done the first album in one day (actually at least two days), we had the luxury of two or three days to do Paranoid. We suddenly had to write a whole album so we got stuck into rehearsals at nine in the morning trying to come up with stuff.

While the rest of the band was out getting lunch, Iommi had the moment of inspiration that would establish them among the rock greats. “I came up with the riff for Paranoid and when they got back I couldn’t wait to play it for them. We recorded it there and then, in as long as it took to play it through.”

Bill Ward : We all looked at each other because we knew something is gonna happen. So, as he rushed to keep behind the microphone, I was fumbling with my drum kit, trying to get into this little booth, you know, put my headphones on, because I knew we are going to roll. We did, we rolled it out.

I had one bass drum only when we did Paranoid, and I’m playing six notes across it. We’re kind of almost pumping. Pumping back in drums, and that holds everything steady while Tony’s off playing his melodies.


Bill Ward (drummer, Black Sabbath) : He was just playing it on his own in the studio. Geezer plugged in his bass, I sat behind my drum kit, we automatically grooved with him and Ozzy started singing. We didn't say a word to each other; we just came in the room and started playing. I think it was about 1:30 in the afternoon; Tony had the riffs, and by 2:00 we had Paranoid exactly as you hear it on the record.

Tony Iommi : Ozzy used to just sing anything, just make stuff up, until Geezer had written the lyrics for him. So we’d put the track down and Ozzy would just mumble anything that came into his head, and then do the proper vocals afterwards.

Geezer Butler (bassist, Black Sabbath) : I wrote the lyrics and Ozzy just read them as he was singing it.


Ozzy Osbourne : The song (Paranoid) was an accident. The Paranoid album was going to be called War Pigs - the sleeve had been printed. We had three and a half minutes to finish the album. Tony came up with the riff for Paranoid, Geezer gave me the lyric, and that was that then. As a co-writer, you can sit there for months and come up with Jack shit and then somebody will spark something and in, like, half a minute you’ll write an album.


Bill Ward : It’s (Hand Of Doom) almost like a day in the park. It’s just real funky, it’s really jazz-like to me. I can do a lot of nice hi-hat work, a lot of stick work. I play on the rim, live, like a rimshot. I can put in nice big bass drums.
(Source : drum magazine)

Bill Ward : When Tony played those enormous chords in front of War Pigs, I would look and I would go, ’Okay, what am I going to do? How is this going to be presented? So I put the whole thing in waltz time. And Geezer, Geezer went there, and he fit it perfectly with what Tony was doing. So that’s what it is. I think the song would’ve been a train wreck had I played [straight] drums to it. I went into waltz time and I made broad strokes and huge cymbal crashes – that’s what made the whole thing pop. I'm not saying that I made the whole thing pop, but that helped to make the whole thing pop.

Rodger Bain (producer) : It (Paranoid) had a very strong beat, a powerful riff. I remember pressing the talkback and saying words to the effect of, ‘That's pretty good. What is that?’ and sort of getting disbelief. They said, ‘You're joking’. I said, ‘No, that's really good, that's a really strong riff.’ They said, ‘We're just pissing around. We just made it up.’ I said, ‘Well, that's great - let's do it!’”

Ozzy Osbourne : I remember going home with the tapes and I said to my then-wife, 'I think we've written a single.' She said, 'But you don't write singles.' I said, 'I know, but this has been driving me nuts on the train all the way back.'

Bill Ward : I thought, 'This is a bit of a pop song’. I didn't really pay a whole lot of attention to it.

Jun 18, 1970 : Black Sabbath are recording tracks for their second album, Paranoid, at Island Records’ Basing Street Studios, London, UK.
Bill Ward : There were no metronomes and everybody just went in and played live, and that was that. That’s as theatrical as we got, you know? So Tony [Iommi, guitars] and I had to lay a really good base in the rhythm tracks. We had to really get it right.

A lot of our drum sounds were very click-y. They were very boom-y or blatt-y. I listen back and I still go, ’Ooh …’ It’s pretty painful.

Jul 17, 1970 : Black Sabbath release their second single, Paranoid, in the UK.
Joe Smith (executive, Warner Brothers) : We were looking for a single, and they were hard to get. There was still resistance in Top 40 radio to playing any single by one of these bands. If somebody's going to take a shot, Paranoid was the record to take a shot with. Also, it was a great title for a single at the time.

Ozzy Osbourne : It’s my anthem. Every time I play it onstage they all love it. The Kinks have got You Really Got Me and I’ve got Paranoid.

Aug 28, 1970 : Paranoid gives Black Sabbath their first UK pop singles chart entry, and will peak at No4.
Jim Simpson : Once Sabbath started to become successful they got approaches from several interested parties, including Don Arden. He used Wilfred Pine and Patrick Meehan to approach the band, which they did via Carl Wayne of The Move. The band told me they’d had a meeting in a Wimpy Bar. The fact that they told me this had happened, made me feel we had a strong bond.

Sep 4, 1970 : Black Sabbath fire their manager Jim Simpson, in Birmingham, UK.


Sep 18, 1970 : Black Sabbath release their second album, Paranoid, in the UK.
Paranoid entered the UK albums chart on September 26, 1970, going on to peak at No1 during a twenty-week run. Paranoid, both the album and single, transformed Sabbath into a global sensation.

Bill Ward (drummer, Black Sabbath) : Paranoid was a brilliant time in my life. We were a real band – simple and incredibly complex. Our passion was incredible, and we encouraged each other to progress… all the time. We were musically tight, we overcame odds and obstacles, we stayed true to ourselves and each other, we believed in what we were playing, we were committed. We had an un-manipulated rock spirit that had do’s and dont’s built into it, like loyalty to our fans, giving the very best performances possible on any given day or night, going full-bore on stage with intensity and rawness (as reflected on Paranoid). We searched ourselves for our own best in order to become stronger and more musically effective for the good of the band, and to be different from other bands, e.g. in arrangements and volume and lyrical substance… I love the guys, and I’m forever honoured to be a part of Sabbath.

Sep 24, 1970 : Black Sabbath perform Paranoid on Top Of The Pops.
Tony Iommi : When Paranoid was a hit, we felt like traitors. We weren’t trying to appeal to the young kids who watched Top Of The Pops. That wasn’t our audience. Of course, when Paranoid was a hit we did Top Of The Pops, and we felt so out of place, and we looked out of place too. It just wasn’t our scene at all. And at the gigs we started getting a lot of young screaming kids. When they heard our other stuff they probably shit themselves and ran out.
Jim Simpson : Around then, Pine and Meehan split from Don Arden, and their first project was to take over the management of Sabbath.

I felt I was doing the job right. My office at that time consisted of just me and a secretary, and I had decided that I was not going to double up as a policeman by doing things like guarding their dressing room door. I felt I had to get to bed at a decent hour, get up early and spend the day doing all of the business necessary to support the band.

I only found out about what Pine and Meehan had done when I got a letter in the post telling me that Black Sabbath had now left my management stable, they didn’t think I was doing the job right, and would I please never contact them again.

We had contracts, of course, which my lawyer insisted were watertight, so I took out several injunctions, and then I took them to court for the first time in 1970.

I felt I was badly served by the law. The QC my lawyer employed in 1970 said we should go for £200,000, and he instructed me not to accept any out of court offers from Meehan, who had gone up as far as £80,000 to settle it. Then the QC decided that Sabbath didn’t have any money, so he settled for £35,000, of which £8000 was paid on the day, out of which legal aid got £6,000, the QC got £1,000 and I got £1,000. It took me fourteen years to get the rest.

Don Arden came and offered me sympathy and moral support as soon as he heard I’d lost them. He later supplied me with an office and secretarial services in Central London, free of charge. On one occasion, he heard that I’d had a break-in at my house and various things had been stolen including a Revox tape recorder and some Tannoy speakers. I bellyached about it to his secretary and by the time I got home to Birmingham that evening, he’d had replacements delivered for me. He didn’t even ask. he just did it, and I’ve still got those speakers to this day.



Oct 30, 1970 : Black Sabbath begin their first tour of the USA, with a show at Esbjornson Gym, Glassboro College, Glassboro, New Jersey.
(On their first American tour, Bill Ward energized one lethargic audience by throwing his bass drum at them.)
Tony Iommi : It was such an experience. We went to New York first. We took our own PA over but we had no cases for the speakers or anything – so when it got there it was half in bits. It was a disaster from the beginning. One of our roadies plugged the PA in and of course in America the power source is different, so it blew up. We ended up in this really small club and we thought, is this what it’s like? It was a bit disappointing.
Nov 10, 1970 : The Faces play at The Fillmore East, New York City, USA, supported by Black Sabbath.
Tony Iommi : We did the Fillmore East, and blimey, it was fantastic. We supported The Faces and we went down really well. That was the biggest place we’d ever played.
The women in America just seemed a lot more forward to the women back home, a lot more open. We were like kids in a candy shop. We couldn’t believe it. We had women coming up and talking to us – instead of blokes coming and talking to us. When we checked into a hotel there were all these women there, but we didn’t know anything about groupies. We didn’t know how that scene worked. It was certainly an eye-opener, that’s for sure.
With a name like Black Sabbath, we had all sorts of weird people coming to the gigs in America – witches and all sorts. There would be people coming to our hotel with black cloaks on, lighting candles. It was something that grew out of proportion. You never know what people will do. You didn’t know what sort of people would be around. Some of those religious weirdoes were as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan.
The most disturbing thing I ever had was when one person came on stage with a dagger to stab me. Very disturbing to say the least! We were playing this open-air show. When we got to the gig, somebody had painted a cross on a door in red. We didn’t think much else of it. But later on we found out this bloke had cut his hand and drawn the cross in his blood. He was some religious freak. During that show, my amps were playing up and I really got pissed off. I lost my temper and kicked my stack over and walked off. And as I’m walking off, this bloke’s behind me. He’d got past security but somebody managed to jump on him. I didn’t know what was happening. I was still moaning about my gear. It was only afterwards that I found out this bloke had a dagger and was trying to bump one of us off.
11 Nov 1970 : Black Sabbath play the first of five nights at the Whiskey A Go Go, Hollywood, California, USA.





Jan 71 : UK tour with Curved Air

Jan 20, 1971 : Ozzy Osbourne’s first daughter, Jessica Starshine, is born.

Jan 30, 1971 : Black Sabbath hold a press conference in Sydney, New South Wales, (or possibly in Wellington, New Zealand on the 29th) to tie in with their first Australian visit.

Feb 1971 : Sabbath start work on their third album, Master Of Reality, at island Studios, London. It is during these sessions that Iommi begins tuning his guitar down by three semi-tones, to reduce string tension and make the instrument easier to play with his severed fingers. Happily, this essentially pragmatic step resulted in the heavier sound which made this album the forerunner of doom, stoner and sludge metal.

Feb 17,1971 : Sabbath begin their second tour of North America with a show at The Sunshine Inn, Asbury Park, New Jersey.

Feb 23, 1971 : Sabbath play the first of two nights at Inglewood Forum, Los Angeles.
Tony Iommi : The first time I tried coke was backstage LA Forum in 1971. I happened to say to one of the guys in the crew, ‘You know, I really feel tired tonight.’ He said, ‘Why don’t you have a line?’ Of course I’d been around it for a while, but I would never take it. He said, ‘Go on, it’ll really perk you up. And so I did. I only had a little bit. One line. But for me, it felt great.

Apr 2, 1971 : Black Sabbath’s current tour of the USA ends at The Spectrum, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA. Mountain and Humble Pie are on the same bill.
Tony Iommi : The success happened so quickly, but we just went along with it. The only thing that messed with our heads was when we got more into the drugs. But we had some problems playing in those big arenas. The Spectrum in Philadelphia, being an ice rink, they had this big machinery in the back – generators to keep the ice from melting, and God knows what else. And this machinery always used to effect my equipment. My whole guitar sound just turned into this horrendous racket. I had this treble booster that I plugged into my amp, and you name it, it picked everything up – you’d hear a bloody cab radio and all sorts. So those gigs for me were a bloody nightmare.

Apr 5, 1971 : Black Sabbath finish work on the album Master Of Reality in Island Studios, London, UK.
Tom Allom (engineer) : Master of Reality was the third one that I did.  They wrote that in the studio and that kind of dragged on and took a massive month.  That one was a test, as they were not really prepared like they were for the first album. 

Tony Iommi : During Master of Reality, we started getting more experimental and began taking too much time to record. Ultimately, I think it really confused us. Sometimes I think I’d really like to go back to the way we recorded the first two albums. I’ve always preferred just going into the studio and playing, without spending a lot of time rehearsing or getting sounds.

Tony Iommi : We did have a bit of pressure when we made that album. Once you’ve had a number one, there’s only one way you’re going to go. And if you’re going to try to compete with yourself on that level, it’s a lot of pressure. When we made Master Of Reality, I think that freaked Bill out. We changed studios two or three times because we weren’t happy, and Bill wanted this particular drum sound. You know when you have a sound in your head and you just can’t get it? It gets more and more frustrating. It got very difficult for Bill, and of course there was the drugs as well…
On Master Of Reality we tuned down to get more power. It was an experiment. Tuning down gave it a fatter sound. And with the vocals, you can sing in a lower register – but of course, Ozzy didn’t. He started singing higher. You’d tune down and he’d go, ‘Oh, I can reach that note now.’ Consequently when we got on stage he couldn’t do it. Oh dear…

Ozzy Osbourne : Children Of The Grave was the most kick-ass song we'd ever recorded.

Tony Iommi : Things like Solitude worked well. Just pushing the envelope a bit. I started playing this thing and it sounded a bit wimpy, but everybody liked it. So we carried on playing it, and it worked. I ended up playing a bit of flute on it as well. It was something different. The idea with a lot of the Sabbath stuff was to have light and shade. Either put a quiet bit into a song or to do a quiet song into the next track – instead of it all being out-and-out pounding, to have a bit of light relief.


Tony Iommi : We tried recording Into The Void in a couple of different studios because Bill just couldn’t get it right. Whenever that happened, he would start believing that he wasn’t capable of playing the song. He’d say, 'To hell with it — I’m not doing this!' There was one track like that on every album, and 'Into the Void' was the most difficult one on Master of Reality.

Tony Iommi : 'Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope?’ (in After Forever). It was just tongue in cheek. We just did what we felt. We never thought, oh, we can’t do that. We just said. ‘Let’s do it!’

Tony Iommi : We all played Sweet Leaf while stoned.

Tony Iommi : I do remember writing Sweet Leaf in the studio. I'd just come back from Dublin, and they'd had these cigarettes called Sweet Afton, which you could only get in Ireland. We were going, 'What could we write about?' I took out this cigarette packet, and as you opened it, it's got on the lid, 'The Sweetest Leaf You Can Buy!' I was like, 'Ah, Sweet Leaf!'

Tony Iommi : Right at the start of the song, that’s me bloody choking myself. I was in the studio doing this acoustic thing, and Ozzy rolled this big joint and brought it out. I had a couple of puffs and nearly choked myself. They left the tape running, and it turned into the ideal start for Sweet Leaf. At first I didn’t do that much smoking, but when they all started doing it, I’d do it as well. I couldn’t handle it like them. It used to affect me quite quick and I’d get a bit paranoid.

Bill Ward : That's about meeting marijuana, having a relationship with marijuana ... That was part of our lifestyle at that time.

Tom Allom : What (Bill Ward) and Geezer were doing together was incredible, actually.  They were a three-piece band and they were almost a jazz band, really. 

Bill was not playing a straight beat.  The other thing that blows me away, when I think about it, is how young they were.  They were twenty years old.  It is amazing.  I was only 21, or 22.  To have developed that unique style by that tender ago is incredible.  It didn’t seem that way to me then.  It did take me by surprise because I had never heard music like that because, then, nobody had. 

Tony Iommi : I didn’t want to be the boss as such. It was just that they looked to me as a leader. I came up with the ideas, I pushed the band forward, and if anything happened I was the one that they’d come to. It was a big responsibility. And the same in the studio: they’d go home and I’d still be in there. The music, I wanted it to the best it could possibly be, and I was worried to leave it in other people’s hands. I wanted to be there. I liked to see it through.



Jul 1, 1971 : Black Sabbath release their third album, Master Of Reality, in the UK, where it peaks at No5. In the USA, it is certified gold on advance orders alone, and goes on to achieve a higher chart placement than Paranoid, peaking at No8, eventually going double-platinum.


Jul 2, 1971 : The North American leg of Black Sabbath’s Master Of Reality tour begins at the Public Auditorium, Cleveland, Ohio, USA, supported by Yes, Brewer And Shipley and Sweathog.
Rick Wakeman (keyboards, Yes) : Back then, I was a serious drinker, as were all of Sabbath, so we got on like a house on fire, matching each other drink for drink. They had a spare seat on their private plane, so a lot of the time I’d travel with them. You literally couldn’t move for booze on that plane. Ozzy was probably putting away as much as me – which was as much as humanly possible.


Jul 21, 1971 : Black Sabbath release their third album, Master Of Reality, in the USA. Released at the same time as a single, Children Of The Grave has become arguably the album’s most significant track.

Like War Pigs and Electric Funeral from Paranoid, it has an anti-war sentiment, but now enhanced by Geezer Butler's exhortations to non-violent civil disobedience.



Aug 21, 1971 : Black Sabbath enter the UK album chart with Master Of Reality, which will peak at No5.
Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins) : This changed the way I thought when I was eight years old. I'd picked it up from my uncle. The album looked so cool with its dark evil colour and purple writing. I put it on and listened to its stupid Ozzy intro and it sounded so heavy. Okay, the lyrics are pretty hit or miss. Sweet Leaf is their bad ode to pot and never has a man rhymed 'insane' with 'brain' so many times. But the music is amazing. It spawned grunge. Unfortunately. A lot of bands wouldn't admit to its influence, I guess because of the satanic connection.

Oct 28, 1971 : Black Sabbath’s North American tour ends at The Community War Memorial Auditorium, Rochester, New York State, USA.

Bill Ward : We were getting into coke, big time. Uppers, downers, Quaaludes, whatever you like. It got to the stage where you come up with ideas and forget them, because you were just so out of it.

The band started to become very fatigued and very tired. We'd been on the road non-stop, year in and year out, constantly touring and recording. I think Master of Reality was kind of like the end of an era, the first three albums, and we decided to take our time with the next album.

Feb 10, 1972 : Black Sabbath play at The Dome, Brighton, Sussex, UK, supported by Wild Turkey.
Keith Altham : Just after I’d left the NME and I was freelancing as a writer, I interviewed Ozzy for Record Mirror down in the Brighton Dome. He was always very engaging and pleasant to talk to, not nearly as terrifying as the image suggested.

Backstage, in the dressing room after the concert, Geezer Butler had just come off stage in a white chamois leather suit with a zip down the front that was dripping with sweat, and he opened up a suitcase in which he had another identical suit and he put it on. Ozzy saw me watching this and said, ‘E loiks to be recognoized when ‘e leaves the stage door.’ He just didn’t want to be torn apart in a sweat-sodden suit. (Source : interview with Johnny Black, March 2009)

Feb 24, 1972 : Black Sabbath come to the end of a UK tour at St George’s Hall, Bradford, supported by Wild Turkey.
Black Sabbath come to the end of a UK tour at St George’s Hall, Bradford, supported by Wild Turkey.

March 19, 1972 : Black Sabbath, Yes and Wild Turkey play at The Convention Center Rotunda, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA.
William Arnold (audience) : I was about 20 years old at the time, Yes lifted the place to another plane of rapture, only to be brought harshly down by the stark reality of an inferior Black Sabbath. I've never seen people leave in groups of tens and twenties like that, before or since, trying to get away from Sabbath's mistake of letting Yes play before them.

Apr 2, 1972 : Black Sabbath come to the end of a US tour at the Capitol Theater, Passaic, New Jersey, USA.

May 1972 : While renting a Bel Air mansion, Sabbath begin recording Vol 4 at Record Plant Studios, Los Angeles. During these sessions, cocaine begins to exert a serious grip on the band, as a result of which Bill Ward begins to fear that he will be thrown out of the band.
Bill Ward : Vol. 4 is a great album, but listening to it now, I can see it as a turning point for me, where the alcohol and drugs stopped being fun.

Tony Iommi : We lived in a beautiful house in Bel Air. It was John Dupont’s house – the guy from Dupont Paints. It had a ballroom and bar leading out to the garden. We rehearsed in the bar area. It was a big room. We had the gear set up there, but we never thought for a minute that all the sound was going out across the valley. It was dead quiet outside. You could hear a pin drop at night. We used to write in the day and jam at night. It was a great atmosphere. We had a fabulous time. And in this ballroom there was a grand piano.
We used to have this coke flown in especially, in sealed containers, sealed with wax. You’d peel the wax off and there are these phials of coke. And bloody hell, it was great the cocaine in those days. We’d sit up all night, gassing.
Geezer Butler : Yeah, the cocaine had set in. We went out to L.A. and got into a totally different lifestyle. Half the budget went on the coke and the other half went to seeing how long we could stay in the studio...We rented a house in Bel-Air and the debauchery up there was just unbelievable.

Tony Iommi : We were totally gone. It really was a case of wine, women and song, and we were doing more drugs than ever before.

Ozzy Osbourbe : Eventually we started to wonder where the fuck all the coke was coming from...I'm telling you: that coke was the whitest, purest, strongest stuff you could ever imagine. One sniff, and you were king of the universe.

Tony Iommi : I went into the ballroom and played the piano for a bit. I’d never played piano before. And I leant to play and the first thing I wrote on it was Changes.
Ozzy Osbourne : With Changes, Tony just sat down at the piano and came up with this beautiful riff. I hummed a melody over the top, and Geezer wrote these heartbreaking lyrics about the break-up Bill was going through with his wife. I thought that was brilliant from the moment we recorded it.
Tony Iommi : We used to make our own entertainment. It was mad, really. We were in the studio one day and I took my guitar off and put it on the stand, and as I put it down it went, Boing! And I can’t think for the life of me why we ended up taking our clothes off, but it was one of those stupid things that you do. That’s how we recorded that track, prancing around, naked, banging the guitar. We were stoned, of course. And that became FX. We were always joking around. That was our release: to joke around with each other and play jokes on each other.
Bill Ward : I hated the song (Cornucopia). There were some patterns that were just horrible. I nailed it in the end, but the reaction I got was the cold shoulder from everybody. It was like 'Well, just go home, you're not being of any use right now.' I felt like I'd blown it, I was about to get fired.
Tony Iommi : LA was a real distraction for us, and that album ended up sounding a bit strange. The people who were involved with the record really didn’t have a clue. They were all learning with us, and we didn’t know what we were doing either. The experimental stage we began with Master of Reality continued with Vol. 4, and we were trying to widen our sound and break out of the bag everyone had put us into.

Jul 7, 1972 : Black Sabbath begin another North American tour at The Convention Hall, Wildwood, New Jersey.

Jul 30, 1972 : The Palace Concert Theatre, supported by Blue Oyster Cult.
Alan Lanier (Blue Oyster Cult) : When we started, we copped a lot from Black Sabbath. I don't think our band sounds anything at all like Black Sabbath, though, but we used to like them a lot because Ozzy Osborne used to work in a slaughterhouse and that had a kind of poetic symbolity for us.


Sep 2, 1972 : The Hemdale Group, (incl director Patrick Meehan), already managers of Black Sabbath, buys the remaining two and a half years of its recording contract with Essex Music Group for a reported $1,837,000.

Sep 15, 1972 : Black Sabbath play at The Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles.
Ozzy Osbourne : Tony had been doing coke literally for days - we all had, but Tony had gone over the edge. I mean, that stuff just twists your whole idea of reality. You start seeing things that aren't there. And Tony was gone. Near the end of the gig he walked off stage and collapsed.

Geezer Butler : It was really touch-and-go at one point whether he'd survive or not because he was totally depleted. So we had to cancel the rest of the tour and we actually took time off for the first time since the band started. We got away from each other and had a social life. Then we came back together to start on the next album, and couldn't come up with anything.

Sep 25, 1972 : Black Sabbath release Vol. 4 on Vertigo Records in the UK.
Tony Iommi : Vol.4 was such a complete change, we felt we had jumped an album, really. It didn't follow suit, because we had tried to go too far ... we had reached the limit as far as we wanted to go.


Dec 3, 1972 : Black Sabbath play at The Royal Albert Hall, London, UK.
Andrew Weiner (journalist) : You didn't hear the bass - you felt it hit you in the stomach. You didn't hear the drums, except as a general background noise. All you heard was those thunderous riffs and broken vocal fragments riding out the storm. Children Of The Grave wasn't downer rock but a hymn of affirmation. Affirmation and white noise.

1973, early : Drummer Bill Ward rents Fields Farmhouse in Bishampton, Evesham, Worcestershire.
David Tangye (Ozzy’s PA) : Fields Farmhouse in Bishampton, Evesham, was given the name of Roadies Retreat because it became a favourite stopping off place for AC/DC Crew, Judas Priest, and the guys from Clash. 

Bill Ward rented Fields Farmhouse in 1973 to early 74 following the split from his first wife Theresa, although he did not spend a massive amount of that time ensconced there! Due to touring and other band commitments. Malcolm Horton, Bill’s artist friend, would look after the place in his absence, Graham Wright (Sabbath’s Drum tech and personal assistant to Bill) took care of the running and bills after Malcolm and friends left the farmhouse. Graham stayed at Fields Farm and call it home up to the 1980's.

There were all sorts of visitors to Fields farm back then, Keith "Evo" Evans, who Road managed Judas Priest and later AC/DC had met and was quite friendly with loads of bands and crews given the touring work he was doing. Terry Lee who was close with Evo, and Graham Wright, went on to set up Light and Sound Design in Birmingham, were all well know figures in the music scene back then.

Terry Lee had been working with the Clash on their "White Riot" outing, he became friends with Joe Strummer, and Mick Jones, all of who called at Fields Farm to embrace the tranquillity.

Angus Young of AC/DC also made it round for a visit, and Graham Wright took him shopping to Evesham for a pair of Jeans.


Summer 1973 : After an abortive attempt to re-kindle the spirit of Vol 4 by recording at The Record Plant, they begin recording Sabbath Bloody Sabbath at Clearwell Castle, a 17th century gothic mansion in The Forest of Dean.

Geezer Butler : Around the time of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, we found out that we were being ripped off by our management and our record company.

Tony Iommi : When we did Vol.4, we had such a great time and the atmosphere was so great (at The Record Plant), we said, ‘Right, we’ll do the same again for the next album.’ We got the same house and booked the same studio. But when we went down to the studio we found out that they’d built a big Moog in the room for Stevie Wonder. So obviously that was out of the question – we couldn’t get in. And then we started trying to write and I just hit a wall. I couldn’t think of anything. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never had writer’s block before. And the more worried I got, the worse it got.

There was a fight at some point. I remember pulling Ozzy up to get him off Geezer, and he’d got this fur coat on, and as I pulled him up the collar came off in my hands. Ozzy didn’t know where he was. He took a swing at me and missed. And I didn’t. But it was horrible. We never used to fight and it really did feel bad. For a long time, it really hurt inside. We weren’t like that.
What we wanted to do was go somewhere that was out of the way, so we wouldn’t have people turning up. So we went to Clearwell Castle (in Gloucestershire). I thought, we’ll get a bit of atmosphere there. There were dungeons in the basement and that’s where we set up the gear. The dungeons weren’t huge rooms – like a big jail. As soon as we got down there, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was the first track I came up with, the first riff. The whole vibe in those dungeons made me come up with that riff. And once we’d got the starter song, we could just carry on. That was great for us. It was really good, quite exciting.
David Tangye (roadie) : My first real close encounter with Sabbath was when Necromandus, who were gigging around the Country, went up to Clearwell Castle rehearsal studios in Gloucestershire to pick up some spare 4 x 12 speakers we needed from Spock Wall, Sabbath’s Road Manager. Sabbath were rehearsing for the Sabbath Blood Sabbath album at Clearwell Castle.

We met everyone on our arrival, Ozzy Tony Bill Geezer and road crew.
I remember it was a glorious sunny day and we went down to the local pub to cool off.

Returning back to the Castle with flagons of Cider, we carried on to the early hours.

Ozzy had banked the fire up in the Inglenook hearth in a large living room, as was his penchant. After having crashed out, we were awakened by the smell of burning and discovered that Ozzy's flares were on fire from a burning ember, I, with others, rapidly doused his pants with what remained of the Cider!  

Tony Iommi : After a couple of days at the castle, we started pissing around with each other. We set up one of the crew guys. When he was out we went into his room. There were these big curtains. We got all this fishing line and put some through the curtains and through this model ship that was on top of the fireplace. We fixed it so you couldn’t see the wires, and we ran the wires outside of the room and had labels on them so we knew what each one was. So the roadie came back to his room and got into bed, and we all waited outside, giggling. He was reading a book, and we started moving the curtains. We heard him go, ‘Who’s that?’ And then we’d stop, leave it for a bit. Then we’d move the ship. You’d hear him again: ‘Who’s that?’ Eventually he shit himself. He thought there was a ghost in there. And of course when he came running out we were all there, killing ourselves laughing. But it actually did backfire on all of us – we actually did see something there. One night Geezer and me were walking along this hallway and there was an armoury at the end of this hallway, with all these weapons on the wall. We saw someone going into the armoury. We said, ‘Who the fuck’s that?’ There was nobody else there – we’d rented the whole castle. There was just the one entrance to the armoury – no other doors. And when wen in there we couldn’t find anybody. There was a big oak table – we looked under there. We looked everywhere. Nothing. That was a bit strange. The next day, we spoke to the woman who owned the castle. We said: ‘You’re going to think we’re a bit mad, but we saw somebody walking around last night and go in the armoury and they just disappeared in there.’ And the woman said, ‘Oh, that’s the castle ghost.’ Oh! Some odd things happened there…
Tony Iommi : Ideas weren't coming out the way they were on Volume 4 and we really got discontented. Everybody was sitting there waiting for me to come up with something. I just couldn't think of anything. And if I didn't come up with anything, nobody would do anything.

Geezer Butler : We almost thought that we were finished as a band... Once Tony came out with the initial riff for Sabbath Bloody Sabbath we went 'We're baaaack!'

Tony Iommi : I’ve got to be honest, we frightened the life out of each other. We had to leave in the end, everybody terrified of each other because we were playing jokes on each other and nobody knew who was doing it... We used to leave and drive all the way home and drive back the next day. It was really silly.

Ozzy Osbourne : We weren't so much the Lords of Darkness as the Lords of Chickenshit when it came to that kind of thing. We wound each other up so much none of us got any sleep. You'd just lie there with your eyes wide open, expecting an empty suit of armour to walk into your bedroom at any second to shove a dagger up your arse.

Tony Iommi : We rehearsed in the dungeons and it was really creepy but it had some atmosphere, it conjured up things, and stuff started coming out again,

A cloaked figure [was] coming towards us in the hallway. We were setting up the gear in the dungeons and we were the only people there. It was myself and Geezer... or myself and Ozzy, we were walking down the hallway and we saw somebody coming towards us, we thought, 'Who is that?'

It walked into this room and we followed it to see who it was and there was nobody there. It was an armoury with all the weapons on the wall and there was nothing else in there. We told the people about it who owned the castle, we thought they'd think we were mad. But they just said, 'Oh yes, that's the castle ghost'.

Geezer Butler : A National Acrobat was just me thinking about who selects what sperm gets through to the egg; Spiral Architect was about life's experiences being added to a person's DNA to create a unique individual. I used to get very contemplative on certain substances. I still do, but without those substances.

Ozzy Osbourne : I'd written it (Who Are You?) one night at Bulrush Cottage while I was loaded and fiddling around with a Revox tape machine and my ARP 2600.

Recording was completed at Morgan Studios in Willesden, North London. Keyboardist Rick Wakeman of the band Yes (who were recording Tales from Topographic Oceans in the next studio) was brought in as a session player. Rick Wakeman played harpsichord on Sabbra Cadabra but refused payment from the band and was ultimately compensated with beer for his contribution.

Rick Wakeman : Was Ozzy going off the rails when I worked on [1973’s] Sabbath Bloody Sabbath? I don’t think he was ever on the rails, was he? Actually, I think Ozzy is very clever, because he’s got this knack of appearing to be out of control, while actually being perfectly in control. I never saw him too wasted to perform.

3 Nov 1973 : Tony Iommi marries wealthy socialite Susan Snowdon.
Tony Iommi : John Bonham and I used to see each other in the days before Sabbath. Bill and me were in another local band called The Rest, and we used to play gigs at this place in Birmingham, once a month, and alternate weeks they’d have these other bands – and John used to be in two of three of them. He’d be in one band, then they’d fire him because he was too loud, and then the next week he’d turn up in another band. John used to have this bass drum case where he had the names of the band he was with – and all these names would be crossed out as he got the sack because he was too bloody loud.
When John was my best man, I think it worried everybody. My wife was fine about it. To be honest, she didn’t know many of my friends. John and me would go out clubbing, just the two of us, and of course the night before my wedding we went out for my stag night. We had a driver. We went to two or three clubs around Birmingham. And the last club we went to, a little upstairs place, it was getting on for two o’clock, and we go in there and John goes up to the bar and orders twelve bottles of champagne. He said, ‘Open them all.’ I thought, oh, that’s nice – he’s going to treat everybody in the club. And he turned to me and said, ‘Go on, then, drink it.’ I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘That’s yours!’ I said, ‘I can’t drink that – you’re joking.’ He said, ‘Drink it, you’re getting married tomorrow.’ I said, ‘I fucking won’t be getting married if I drink all that!’ Anyway, he went along the bar and drank twelve glasses, one from each bottle. And within thirty minutes he was gone – absolutely gone. And I’m trying to get him out of the club. The club was closing. I said, ‘We’ve got to get him home.’ The owner of the club came up, John got him round the neck, and the poor bloke fell down the stairs. It was terrible. Anyway, we got John the in the car and took him home. I went back with him and his wife Pat wouldn’t let him in. He rang the buzzer at the gate and she answered: ‘He’s not coming in.’ I said, ‘Pat, please, you’ve got to let him in. Look, I’m getting married in the morning, I can’t take him home.’ So she said, ‘Okay, but he’s not coming upstairs.’ She opened the gates, opened the door of the house, and I put him in the hallway, up against a radiator. I said: ‘You’re not going to turn up tomorrow, are you?’ And he just slurred and stuck his thumb up. I left him there and that was it. I went home and thought, he’s not gonna bloody turn up. But he turned up alright. It was so early – about eight in the morning. He’d got his suit on, his top hat and tails. I’d literally just got out of bed when he arrived. I said, ‘I’m not ready.’ I was still pissed. He said, ‘Here you are – have one of these. This’ll liven you up.’ Of course he had some coke with him. I said, ‘Oh no, I can’t – I don’t want to be doing that today.’ He said, ‘Just have a bit, then.’ And that’s how the day went…
The embarrassing thing for me was when we were in the church. My wife’s family were quite well to do. And on my side there was our band and other musicians. And they’re all nipping out of the church, three or four of them at a time. My wife’s mother said, ‘What’s the matter with your friends, all coming and going all the time?’ I said, ‘Oh, are they?’ And of course, inside I’m thinking, oh no! And there they were behind the church doing coke. I thought, this is gonna be just disastrous.
We’d done this song called Fluff, and it was played in the church as my wife was walking up the aisle, but the fucking tape kept stopping, and everybody was laughing. Then we went back to the house for drinks, and because my wife’s family didn’t drink at all, I was really concerned. Imagine John (Bonham) and Ozzy and everybody else all sloshed – they’d have been throwing things at each other. We had a glass of champagne to toast, and John of course wanted a refill, and they filled him up with apple juice. He drank it, spat it out and shouted: ‘Fucking apple juice?’ It was so loud, everybody was staring at him., I’m going, oh my God… And my mum said, ‘Come on John, I’ll take you home.’ She took him to her house just across the way. He had his drinks over there. It was horrible. I couldn’t wait for it all to be over.

Dec 1, 1973 : Sabbath Bloody Sabbath released in the UK on Vertigo.

Dec 8, 1973 : The album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath by Black Sabbath enters the UK album chart, where it will peak at No4. In the USA it will stall at No11.
Ozzy Osbourne : Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was really the album after which I should have said goodbye because, after that, I really started unravelling. Then we ended up falling out of favour with each other.

Slash (guitarist, Guns N' Roses) : The outro to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the heaviest shit I have ever heard in my life. To this day, I haven't heard anything as heavy that has as much soul.


THE IMPERIAL/EXPERIMENTAL PHASE: 1974-75 – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage, the struggle between moving the band forward and the increasing internal problems, management problems, their changing lifestyles and the impact it was having personally and professionally, playing the California Jam festival, the litigation, the growing experimentalism of the sound, touring with Kiss, etc.

Jan 1, 1974 : Sabbath Bloody Sabbath released in the USA on Warner Brothers.

1974, early : Drummer Bill Ward buys Somerville House, Malvern, Worcestershire.
David Tangye (Ozzy’s PA) : Somerville House was a grand house that Bill Ward had decorated by his artist friend with mystical murals. The gardens were looked after by Jim Ward, Bill's brother. Bill had two white horses called Snowy and Silver, unfortunately Silver died when Bill was on tour in USA. It fell to Jim to bury the horse in the field beside the house, after digging a hole with a back hoe machine he had borrowed, he then proceeded to drop it into its final resting place.

Unfortunately Jim hadn't dug far enough down, and the horse’s hooves were sticking out of the ground a good twelve inches. Frantically, Jim managed to hide his gaff before Bill got back from tour.  

I was at Ozzy's house one day, and got a phone call from Bill enquiring if I knew where he could get some wrought iron gates made for the courtyard of his house.

Bill knew that I was a Blacksmith by trade, so I offered my services to him as long as he could arrange with a local Blacksmith, who I knew was just down the road, to use his facilities.

I  spent two weeks at Bill’s house fashioning these gates that centre featured five bars and a G-Clef and the opening notes made in wrought iron to the tune Paranoid.

1974, March : Richard Ogden of Heavy Publicity is hired by Sabbath’s accountant to work on their upcoming UK tour.
Richard Ogden : I was probably employed by the accountant from about March 1974, because I had to set up the tour, which they were very worried was not going to sell out.

When I started looking after Sabbath they were still huge in America, but nobody in the UK took them seriously any more.

By this time, they’d left Patrick Meehan but hadn’t yet taken up with Don Arden. They’d found out that they didn’t really have any money. They had big houses all over the UK, and flashy cars but they didn’t actually own any of them. So they’d got rid of the Meehans.

Tony Iommi : When it came to money, we were always fobbed off. Up to that point, anything we wanted, we’d get it. If I wanted a new Rolls Royce, I’d phone up the office and say, ‘I’ve seen this car.’ ‘Okay, where is it? How much is it?’ I’d tell them. ‘Okay, we’ll sort it out.’ And it would arrive the next day or the next week. And that’s how we’d do it. We were kept quiet. Fobbed off. And that’s how it all went. We bought houses the same way. And in the meantime, we were kept working. We knew nothing about the legal side of things. There was a lot of stuff going on. Every contract had holes galore in it, so many bloody loopholes.

Richard Ogden : So at the period when I represented them, they didn’t have a manager. They had a guy called Mark Foster, funny little English guy but based in Chicago. He was their accountant and it was him that contacted me, because I had quite a reputation by then for being the 'rock' PR guy, with clients like Aerosmith and Ted Nugent. So Mark Foster asked if I’d like to do Sabbath and of course I did because, to me, they were the band that had invented heavy metal. Foster paid me regularly, but otherwise I never dealt with him again. I only ever dealt directly with the band, and mainly with Bill Ward, who seemed to be the one in charge.

They really didn’t seem to have a lot of money. They were working on a tight budget. They didn’t pay me anything like as much as other bands, like Aerosmith, were paying me at that time. I think the money was still coming in, especially from America, but it had been going straight into the pockets of their manager.

I think I first met them at The Intercontinental Hotel in Paris, but everything was being done almost by committee. There was definitely no manager. In fact, by the time I’d been representing them for about nine months, Bill Ward asked me if I’d be interested in managing them, which was not an idea that appealed to me at all, because they seemed to be surrounded by gangsters and drugs.


Apr 6, 1974 : During an extensive US tour, Sabbath perform to an audience estimated at 400,000 at The California Jam Festival, Ontario Raceway, Ontario, California, USA. Also on the bill are ELP, Deep Purple and The Eagles.
Glenn Hughes (vocalist Deep Purple) : The day before, I spent with Tony Iommi and Ozzy doing lines and drinking beer. We were up all night and Sabbath played before us at Cal Jam. I remember flying in on the helicopter with Coverdale, looking down at the audience, and Sabbath were on stage. We flew in there and…I don't mean to make this sound grandiose, but I knew that show was going to be a great Glenn Hughes moment. I just felt like I was born to play at events like this. I was 22-years-old. I just felt, "You know - I feel real good today. And I'm gonna go out there and I'm gonna give a go." And you know, I think it was a really good statement and testament.

Tony Iommi : The California Jam was fantastic for us, and very frightening, because we hadn’t rehearsed before that gig. Our crew went out there first, and there was such a big commotion going on between Deep Purple and Emerson, Lake And Palmer. Who was going to close the show? We didn’t want to get involved in any of that. I said to our crew guy Spock, ‘Let’s not do this.’ But he phoned me – it was around three o’clock in the morning – and said, ‘You’ve got to come out here, everybody wants to see the band.’ So I phoned the others in the middle of the night, and they thought it was me joking, but I said, ‘We’ve got to go out there.’ Eventually they realized I was serious. We went out there, and we didn’t have any chance to rehearse. We went on stage extremely cold. We hadn’t played for a few months, which was a long time for us. But it was great, really great. One of the best shows we ever did.
We were pretty burnt out by this time. We were doing a lot of stuff - and not just drugs. We were doing a lot of work, a lot of gigs. There was a lot of pressure.
Don Branker (promoter, California Jam) : When I watched Sabbath go out and play they had no lights, they had no tricks, they had no pyro, they had no anything, and i probably watched the greatest show I’ve ever seen in my life. Ozzy just took the quarter million people and took them on a trip.

1974, May 17 : Sabbath begin a UK tour at St. George’s Hall, Bradford, supported by Black Oak Arkansas.
Richard Ogden : So I started work on them with that tour where they were doing town halls and Hammersmith Odeons. The opening act was Black Oak Arkansas, who I also looked after.

I remember the big thing was I got them the covers of Sounds and NME or maybe Melody Maker in the same week, a fact Tony Iommi has never forgotten. They’d never had that before.

1974 May 30 : City Hall, Sheffield, with Black Oak Arkansas.
Richard Ogden : I remember Pennie Smith being with me in Sheffield photographing them, which must have been the NME cover. Probably Nick Kent doing the feature. I knew Nick from the days of Oz because of Hawkwind.

I was standing with Pennie Smith in front of the first row of seats just before Sabbath came on. Their tour manager, Big Albert, came over and said, "I wouldn’t stand there if I was you, mate." But Pennie had to be down there to get her pictures, so they come on and next thing you know we’re submerged under a pile of guys about three deep. I ended up being dragged ignominiously across the stage on my back by Albert and another one of the road crew, with the band laughing their heads off at the sight.

It was an eye-opened for me, because they were very powerful and dynamic on stage and I had never realised what a great singer Ozzy was. He had the perfect voice for that band, not the kind of horrible shrieking that a lot of rock vocalists did. He was a proper singer with a great voice.

Ozzy and his first wife lived on a smallholding somewhere near Birmingham. I drove there in 1974 in my Lancia with Brian Harrigan from Music Week. I remember it because I got nicked for speeding on the overpass round Birmingham, and when we got to Ozzy’s house, it was this kind of bungalow, like a smallholding, where he had all these chickens. At one point, the chickens were making a lot of noise so Ozzy disappeared out of the room, came back with a shotgun and fired it at them out of the window.


1975 :
In February 1975 the band is at Morgan Studios in London, working on the tracks which will become their 6th album, Sabotage. Sessions continue late into each night, with Iommi dividing his time between co-producing with Mike Butcher and refining his guitar sounds. Perhaps because of the infuriating legal turmoil, the album emerged as a much more energised and raging beast than its predecessor.

Geezer Butler : Much of the time, when we weren't onstage or in the studio, we were in lawyer's offices trying to get out of all our contracts. We were literally in the studio, trying to record, and we'd be signing all these affidavits and everything. That's why it's called Sabotage - because we felt that the whole process was just being totally sabotaged by all these people ripping us off.

Tony Iommi : Making that album was terrible for us. We had lawyers coming down to the studio with writs (from Meehan). Then we had to go to court. So we’d be in court in the morning and in the studio in the afternoon. It was bloody awful, a terrible time for us.

Ozzy Osbourne : In the end, I felt like calling it Crossroads and having (soap opera actress) Meg Richardson star on it. Every time there was a session we used to call it chapter 99 – 'Will Black Sabbath complete the album this time?' It was like a bizarre nightmare sometimes, but other times it was fun especially the times when we started throwing custard pies at each other.

At the end of it, I was very confused because I had heard so much of it so I had to leave it alone for some time. When I heard it again at first hearing I hated it. I realised that because of the constant work on it, I had built this barrier in my head but I'm really satisfied with it now. It's not that bad considering that we were all going through a lot of hassle with our own heads, like 'Where can we go from here?' 'What are we going to do to be better than the last one?'

Geezer Butler : When we were making Sabotage, Ozzy was asleep in the bar most of the time. And that’s how he carried on.

Tony Iommi : We could've continued and gone on and on, getting more technical, using orchestras and everything else which we didn't particularly want to. We took a look at ourselves, and we wanted to do a rock album - Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath wasn't a rock album, really."

The signature song from this album is Symptom Of The Universe, reckoned to be one of the earliest examples of thrash metal, written by Iommi and Geezer. Apart from its thrash metal claim to fame, it’s also considered to have been the first example of a progressive metal track, because of the contrasting musical styles it encompasses, notable an acoustic intro and an improvised closing section.

Tony Iommi : It starts with an acoustic bit. (actually in the middle) Then it goes into the up-tempo stuff to give it that dynamic, and it does have a lot of changes to it, including the jam at the end.

Closing track, The Writ, features venomous lyrics by Ozzy directed straight at Patrick Meehan. Ozzy : "I wrote most of the lyrics myself, which felt a bit like seeing a shrink. All the anger I felt towards Meehan came pouring out."

1975, May : Keyboardist Jezz Woodroffe is taken on.
Jezz Woodroffe : My dad, Jack Woodroffe, had owned the Woodroffe Music Shop in Birmingham in 1949, and people like Roy Wood bought their first guitars from our shop. (Nick of Duran Duran got his first Wasp synth there)

In January 1975, we opened up a new shop called Drumland, and the guy who worked in there, Mike Evans, was a brilliant drummer and a mate of Bill Ward’s. So when Bill came in one day and asked if Mike knew any good keyboard players, he recommended me.

Quite soon after that, I got a phone call from Bill, and we met up in the drum shop, for an initial chat. Then I was at my mum’s farm in mid-Wales, when the phone rang and it was Tony Iommi who, to me, was a massive star.

Rick Wakeman had done some keys for them on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and then Tony had done some piano on a couple of tracks but they had no way of reproducing that on stage. So they needed somebody for the live stuff, which is where I came in.

So Tony invited me to rehearsals at Ozzy’s house, which was up near Stoke-On-Trent. It was quite a big house with a huge extension on the back for his studio.

I turned up there in my Rover and parked between a Lamborghini and a Bentley. I thought, "Hmmm, I might be getting somewhere here."

At that first rehearsal I pulled out every trick in the book that I knew, blew them away and that was it. They said, "What are you doing in six weeks’ time?"

I said, "Why?"

They said, "Well, you’re coming to America with us on tour."


Jul 14, 1975 : Black Sabbath begin a North American tour at the Sports Arena, Toledo, Ohio, USA.
Jezz Woodroffe : My first gig with them was July 14, 1975, at the Sports Auditorium, Toledo, Ohio. My previous gig had been to 32 people in Snobs Club in Birmingham, and now I was playing to 8,000.

I think Ozzy had lost confidence in himself even before I joined, but he was still a fantastic front man. He could get any audience in the palm of his hand right from the start, that was his extraordinary talent.

Jul 28, 1975 : Black Sabbath release their sixth studio album, Sabotage, on Warners Records in the USA.
David Tangye : Sabotage was the best album they ever did, because they were running on all that poison that was going around. The aggression, basically against Patrick Meehan, was there in the songs.

Graham Wright designed the album cover and it was a good idea to have the reverse image in the mirror. It was supposed to be in a big castle, with all of them dressed in black, but it didn’t work out. They did it in a studio in Soho, I think. Bill had his wife’s tights on, and Ozzy got nicknamed The Homo In The Kimono.

1975, Aug 2 : Baltimore Civic Centre, Baltimore, USA, supported by Kiss.
Jezz Woodroffe : When I was with Sabbath, a lot of the time they were relying on their support acts to draw the crowds. I know that when we did the tour with Kiss (Aug 75), they put on a fantastic show and pretty much outshone us. The audiences much preferred Kiss to Sabbath.

Oct 9, 1975 : Black Sabbath begin a UK tour at The Empire, Liverpool.
David Tangye (roadie) : There was one incident that took place in the Holiday Inn at Swiss Cottage in London, Ozzy did an interview with a rock journalist (Harry Doherty of Melody Maker) from one of the broadsheet weekly music papers that was circulating back in the mid-seventies. The interview was quite cordial, and there were spliffs being passed around. The journalist totally lost the plot, and got up to leave the interview midstream, headed for the exit, and walked straight into the wardrobe. He was lost, we just fell about at this chap’s total confusion.

Oct 12, 1975 : Black Sabbath play at Colston Hall, Bristol, UK. After the show, Ozzy Osbourne asks roadie David Tangye to become his driver and personal assistant.
David Tangye (roadie) : I got a job working as a humper on Sabbath’s Sabotage Album tour. Necromandus had folded and I got chance to go help out on this tour as I was technically between positions.

Second gig in at Colston HalI Bristol, I met up with Ozzy and he asked me what I was up to. I told him I was just helping out Les Martin and Spock Wall (Sabbath's road managers). After the gig I got a message from Spock telling me that Ozzy wanted to see me in the dressing room? It felt like I was going to see the Headmaster at School, with not the slightest inkling of what he wanted.

I got in the dressing room, the band were buzzing with all the adrenalin of coming off stage after a storming gig. Tony asked about the Necromandus guys and how they were doing, then Ozzy straight out of the blue, asked me if I would be interested doing a bit of driving for him. Gobsmacked, I just said "Yes! when do you want me to start?"

"Now!" was his answer.

Half an hour later I was sitting at the wheel of a beautiful new metallic green Mercedes Benz on my way to the middle of nowhere to Bulrush Cottage, Ranton, Staffordshire. A beautiful farmhouse with studio attached, Ozzy's country retreat.

Bulrush Cottage was situated on Butt Lane about 300 yards from Ozzy's local pub The Hand And Cleaver. Ozzy always said it would have been cheaper to buy the pub than the house, primarily because of the amount of time and money he spent in there on his time off.

Bulrush Cottage looked every bit the idyllic country pile, Ozzy lived there with his wife Thelma and three children. The house itself was kind of split in two, the main farmhouse and, on the other side, this massive studio - or Ozzy's playroom as we came to know it. 

Normally, all was just like any other household, the kids went to school and so on. John Michael Osbourne family man, and Ozzy Osbourne Rock Star, were two different entities totally! Ozzy was a loving, caring parent to his kids. He adored them. I remember him taking the kids to Blackpool for a holiday. You don’t get much more family man than that.

Life was never boring at Bulrush Cottage. Ozzy loved nothing more than entertaining friends and guests. He would love to pull out a bottle or two of his home brewed wine usually it had Skull And Crossbones on the label. You never what elixirs he had added to it.

The comings and goings to Bulrush Cottage were non-stop. This was the mid-1970’s and it was Sabbath’s heyday! You never knew who was going to pull up outside the house, or even who would look over the hedge to see what was happening. It was after a week-long party when the old Necromandus band landed down at the Bulrush Cottage and not long after that it was renamed was renamed Atrocity Cottage.
Strange days indeed.

This was to be where I would spend most of my time whilst I was working for the "Prince of Darkness".  

1975, Oct 18 : City Hall, Newcastle.
Jezz Woodroffe : A lot of daft stuff went on in Newcastle, but it wasn’t just aimed at me, it was aimed at everybody. I had gone to bed early the night before so, when I got up in the morning, they were still all asleep. When it came time to start rehearsing, somebody arrived with 48 bottles of Lowenbrau and they all got pissed and went back to bed.

That night, the crew turned the smoke machines round to blow straight at my keyboard.

Another thing in Newcastle was that there wasn’t room for everybody onstage, and one of the songs had a synth part that Ozzy had done on his ARP, which I had on stage with me. Half of my keyboards were directly under the balcony, where somebody was tucking into a bag of chips, which fell off the balcony and landed on the ARP, making a massive crashing sound. Somehow, in the re-telling, that story became that Bill had thrown a bag of chips at me.

There was always lunacy wherever they went and, as an innocent 24 year old bloke, I’d never seen anything like it.

Oct 22, 1975 : Black Sabbath’s current British tour ends at Hammersmith Odeon, London, UK.
Jezz Woodroffe : Patrick Meehan turned up with all these heavies, extremely scary guys, there were shooters and stuff around. It was when they parted company with Meehan that they’d learned about who actually owned their houses and so on. It was the management. Whenever they wanted money, they had to phone up the management and cash would be sent in the post.

1975, Nov 2 : Black Sabbath play at Phillipshalle, Dusseldorf, Germany, with ZZ Top and The Chapman-Whitney Streetwalkers.
David Tangye : Werner, the local promoter, took us out to The Why Not? Club in Dusseldorf. Roger Chapman’s Streetwalkers were the support band on that particular date, and their drummer Nicko McBrain got involved in a punch up in the club. There was a few having a go at him, so I got up to try and pull him out of there, because it wasn’t fair, and then Albert, a big lad who had been a boxer, followed me over.

One of these guys landed one on the side of my head, but I didn’t react and we managed to pull Nicko out. After that you could feel a heavy presence. I remember there was two lesbians kissin’ and cuddlin’ and Ozzy went over and mooned at them, then he set off up the stairs to the toilet. Halfway up, he took a swing at this fella who had been in the fight but missed him by a country mile. So another bloke waded in and I knocked him down like a bag of shit, and then it all erupted. They were just waiting for us to do anything.

So it became this big fight with me, Albert, Tony, Geoff Lucas who was a big 6 foot 5, and there were iron bars and everything, and next thing I heard this bang which was this guy shooting Albert in the mouth. Knocked his teeth out. If it had been any higher it would have killed him.

So we had to fight our way out of the club, and we ran out into this courtyard where there were taxis. So Tony and I jumped in the back of this taxi and the driver turned round, stuck a gun in our faces, and told us to get out.

Then the police came and arrested us. Werner came down and explained what had happened, so we were allowed to go back to the hotel. We took some extra security on after that.

13 Nov 1975 : UK tour due to start in Cardiff, is curtailed because Ozzy is injured in a motorcycle crash.
David Tangye : Yeah, he fell off a child’s motorised bike and he pulled some muscles, did some damage to his back. He had loads of motorbikes and he was always tearing about on them at Bulrush Cottage.


Dec 3, 1975 : Black Sabbath open a seven-date North American tour at Madison Square Garden, New York City, USA, with Aerosmith in support.
David Tangye (PA to Ozzy Osbourne) : At Madison Square Garden, after Aerosmith had been on and done their bit, I was setting the stage up, putting the drinks and towels and other bits and pieces for the band on. The stage was about fifteen foot high, but I suddenly saw this black shape hitting the edge of the stage. It was this guy who had jumped off the balcony. He was trying to jump onto the stage and he missed. He had to be carried away on a stretcher and I think he died.

Then, when they came on, Tony was tuning his guitar and some guy threw a can of beer that smacked him right on the head, so that caused another delay while he went off to get tape stitches on the cut. The audience turned the guy in to the security staff and they threw him out. Musically, though, the band was fantastic that night. It was such a big thing for them that they were really buzzing.

With it being Ozzy’s birthday, the promoter Howard Stein put on a party for him with a scantily-clad woman who jumped out of a massive big birthday cake with black candles round it, and she burnt her bum on the candles which completely cracked Ozzy up.


THE DECLINE: 1976-79 – the problems reaching a peak and how they fed into two underwhelming albums, taking out AC/DC, Ozzy being committed to an asylum, Ozzy being very briefly replaced by Dave Walker and then coming back, then leaving again, the infamous Van Halen tour, a general sense of a band unravelling.

1976, Jan 10 : The Kursaal, Southend.
Richard Ogden : They were always playing practical jokes. One thing they liked to do was to put bananas in Bill Ward’s slippers. He wore plimsolls onstage when he was drumming, but when he came off at the end of the show he’d put on a dressing gown and slippers. I remember that happening at The Kursaal in Southend. It had obviously happened before, because I remember him going, "Bloody 'ell, not again." And the rest of them laughing their heads off.

1976, Mar 16 : Black Sabbath make an appearance in the High Court, London, UK, when their sacked manager Jim Simpson sues them.

1976 : Tony Iommi produces Quartz debut LP on Jet Records.

Geoff Nicholls (guitarist, Quartz) : Working with Tony on our first album was an eye opener as he showed us a lot of technical stuff which helped us with future things we did.


1976, Summer : recording Technical Ecstasy at Criteria Studios, Miami, Florida.
Tony Iommi : We had a keyboard player then, Gerald Woodroffe. And we’d gone to Ridge Farm to write the album and rehearse. It was good for me, because I could rehearse with Gerald. The other lads used to stay in bed quite late, so you didn’t want to make too much noise. But I’d sit down with Gerald and we’d write all this stuff. So that album was different from the others, but I did like it.
Jezz Woodroffe : As time had gone on I’d got more involved in writing with Tony, and arranging and everything. I wrote most of the Technical Ecstasy album, which I’ve still never had any royalties for.

Tony and me had a real good working relationship. At that time, he was living with Sue Snowden in a stately home, and I used to go over there quite a lot. I felt very comfortable there. He was a phenomenal guitarist but, to my surprise, the only musician he ever listened to was the jazz guitarist Joe Pass. That was the only music I ever heard being played in the house.

Tony Iommi : We went to Miami to record Technical Ecstasy at Criteria Studios. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea. We all stayed in a place right on the beach, and I’d go down to the studio and nobody would be there. The Bee Gees were recording there too, and I spent a lot of time hanging out and doing coke with Barry Gibb. And the Eagles were there, too, in the (studio) room next to us. The Eagles had to pack up because we were too loud.
Geezer Butler : Before we could 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.
Jezz Woodroffe : Ozzy had very little to do with the writing of the songs. Tony did the riffs, Geezer wrote most of the lyrics and the last thing that was done during recording sessions in the studio would be Ozzy putting some vocals over the top.
Tony Iommi : Nobody would take responsibility for the production. No one wanted to bring in an outside person for help, and no one wanted the whole band to produce it. So they left it all to me!

Ozzy Osbourne : In the studio, Tony was always saying, 'We've gotta sound like Foreigner', or 'We've gotta sound like Queen'. But I thought it was strange that the bands we'd once influenced were now influencing us.

Geezer Butler : That was the beginning of the end, that one. We were managing ourselves because we couldn't trust anybody. Everybody was trying to rip us off, including the lawyers we'd hired to get us out of our legal mess. It was really just getting to us around then, and we didn't know what we were doing. And obviously, the music was suffering; you could just feel the whole thing falling apart.

Tony Iommi : Black Sabbath fans generally don’t like much of Technical Ecstasy. It was really a no-win situation for us. If we had stayed the same, people would have said we were still doing the same old stuff. So we tried to get a little more technical, and it just didn’t work out very well.

Jesse Woodroffe : Geezer wanted me to become a full member of the band and the others were happy with that, except Ozzy. I remember having a big meeting about it with the lawyers in Los Angeles, in their super-posh offices, but Ozzy never turned up, because he didn’t want to agree to me being a member. He hated Technical Ecstasy.

1976 : After completing the Technical Ecstasy album in Miami, an increasingly frazzled Ozzy returns to England and checks himself into Stafford County Asylum.

1976, Summer :
Jezz Woodroffe : Bill had this big old farmhouse (Somerville House) in Worcestershire. It had the wrought iron gates at the front with the opening notes of Paranoid on them. It had about ten acres of land where, he used to tell me, he grew the finest raspberries in Britain. He would invite me over to stay but I’d get there and find him in bed, and all he wanted me to do was sit downstairs and play the grand piano in his front room. He wouldn’t get up. He’d spend the day in bed organising tours, talking business to people in Los Angeles on the phone. There was no drumkit to be seen either.

1976, Sep 25 : Black Sabbath’s seventh album, Technical Ecstasy, is released in the USA, where it will limp to No51.

1976, Oct 8 : Black Sabbath release their seventh studio album, Technical Ecstasy, in the UK.

1976, Oct 22. Black Sabbath begin a tour of the USA at The Assembly Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma, with Boston as support.
Jezz Woodroffe : Just before that tour kicked off, I was picked up in the Merc, and then Geezer, and finally Bill at his farm. We had the Merc and we also had an estate car to put all the bags in. When we got to Bill’s, all he had was one plastic bag. He was wearing red tights, a t-shirt and a leather jacket.

When the crew asked where his luggage was, he said, "This is it." One plastic bag full of tights and about three t-shirts. That’s what he was planning to go around America with. It was obvious to me that there was something not quite right.

When we got to America, it was about -10 degrees outside but Bill was still wearing tights and a t-shirt, and the commissionaire at the hotel pointed to Bill and asked, "That gentleman behind you, is he with the band?" We looked back and said, "No, never seen him before." We went in but they wouldn’t let him through the door.

1976 Dec 6. Black Sabbath play in Madison Square Gardens, New York City, USA, with Ted Nugent as support.

1977

1977 Feb 20 : Black Sabbath’s latest North American tour ends at Winterland, San Francisco, USA.
Jezz Woodroffe : Ozzy had got to the point where he really didn’t want to do it any more. I remember, on the last tour I did with them, seeing him being pushed from behind the PA columns onto the stage by a roadie.
1977 ??? :
David Tangye : Ozzy had a big field out the back of Bulrush Cottage, and another one down the road which Ranton Rovers football team used to use as their pitch. One time, about 1977 I think it was, Ozzy asked them to take down their goalposts and they didn’t do it, so he went down and shot the posts down with his pump-action shotgun. Blasted them to bits. I have a picture that was taken at the time.

Ozzy had quite an arsenal of guns. That’s why it got nicknamed Atrocity Cottage. It was like the Bermuda Triangle for birds. Anything that flew over was lucky to get past.

I got Necromandus down there to rehearse with him when Ozzy was planning on doing something solo, but it ended like a gigantic piss-up. Ozzy’s wife left him around then. She’d had enough. Went back to her mam’s and left him to get on with it.

1977 Mar 2. Black Sabbath begin a UK tour at The Apollo, Glasgow, Scotland.

1977 Apr 5 : Black Sabbath begin a European tour at The Pavillon De Paris, Paris, France, with AC/DC in support.

1977, Apr 14 : During a show at The Volkshaus, Zurich, Switzerland, an altercation occurred in an hotel bar in which Angus Young thought Geezer Butler was threatening him with a switchblade knife.

1977, Apr 19 : Sabbath play at The Falconer Centre, Copenhagen, Denmark, supported by AC/DC.
David Tangye :  We played at the Falconer Centre with AC/DC, we stayed in The Plaza Hotel near The Tivoli Gardens. Tony was having trouble with getting an awful buzzing sound on his guitars. John Birch, who made Tony’s guitars, decided to come over to Copenhagen, to see first hand what was causing the problems.

So we met up with John in The Plaza, and I remember Dr. Hook were also on a Scandinavian tour, so I met Dennis Locorrierre. So we met up to have a drink, Ozzy, Bill Ward, myself and John Birch in the bar, with some of the Dr. Hook people. So we asked Hans, the bartender, if he could recommend anything to drink, and he says, "Well, you must try the Elephant Beer … but it’s very, very strong."

Well, we considered ourselves quite used to strong beer, so we got a session going, drinking pint after pint of this stuff, and Hans was saying, "No, you must drink it like wine, not beer." After a few of these, John Birch fell asleep, passed out, and Ozzy borrowed a felt-tip pen from a guy at the bar, and wrote on top of John’s bald head, "I am a twat". So we carried on drinkin’, and then John woke up and started back into the conversation exactly where he’d left off. It was very strange, you know?

As the night went on we started feeling the effects of this elephant beer, and I was sharing a room with Ozzy, so we go back up to the room and crashed out on the beds. I was woken up by the sound of Ozzy being violently sick and I wasn’t feeling much better myself. I was feeling very strange so I decided to phone the hotel doctor. When he came, the first thing he did was give us a telling off about drinking so much of this beer, then he gave us each a jab of something to calm us down, valium or something.

So we got up the next morning, and went down to the reception area where we found John tucking into a big breakfast, as if nothing had happened, but he still had "I am a twat" written on his head.

1977 Apr 22 : Black Sabbath come to the end of a European tour at the Scandinavium, Gothenburg, Sweden, with AC/DC in support.
David Tangye : It was after that tour that I left them. It was all going a bit strange. They weren’t fighting or anything, but they had their differences, and I could see it escalating. It was almost like one of those familiarity breeds contempt things, and they had just got over-familiar.

I was getting paid by the band and they didn’t have a lot of money at that time. They’d gone into a bit of a decline which I think was basically to do with all the touring they were doing. It was non-stop, playing these high-energy shows.

1977 Nov 5 : Ozzy Osbourne quits Black Sabbath because of drink and drug problems, but will return within a few weeks. Dave Walker briefly replaces Ozzy, and does some recording with them for the Never Say Die! album.
Ozzy Osbourne : We had a few internal problems. My father was dying, so that put us out for over three months with the funeral and everything. I left the band for three months before we got back together to record it.

David Tangye : Dave Walker was a mate of Bill’s, and he used to be in Savoy Brown. Ozzy had kind of disappeared. He hadn't gone back down to rehearsals at Rockfield. Tony continued workin' on riffs, but he was getting more and more frustrated with not having a singer around, so Dave Walker was brought in, but he wasn’t Sabbath material. I mean, for one thing, his wife liked him to be in bed early.

Ozzy was a bit cheesed off with the direction the band was going in, bringing in keyboards, which Ozzy never wanted. He wanted the raw Black Sabbath sound.

I think there was an element of hiring Dave Walker just to shock Ozzy to come back, which he did and he announced his arrival with a few blasts of his shotgun outside Bill Ward’s window.

Tony Iommi : I think Ozzy just went through a bad patch and he was unhappy. It wasn’t working for him, so he just left. What the hell do we do now? We brought Dave Walker in, a chap that Bill and me knew.

Dave Walker : They were friends of mine from Birmingham and had been very helpful in me joining Savoy Brown. We used to hang out together, and when Ozzy decided he was going to leave, I was playing in California with this band called Mistress, and that was kinda hittin’ a wall a bit, because our guitar player was playing with Steve Miller, and wasn’t available all the time. And this call comes, "Hey Dave, come on over to England, 'cos Ozzy’s leaving." And they’re real nice guys.

Tony and Black Sabbath were represented at the time by Chrysalis Agency, I believe, and Savoy Brown worked out of that office also. Basically, Tony had a word with Harry Simmonds, Kim’s manager, on my behalf.

We were in this real nice little town, pretty little place. I did a lot of writing with them while I was there, a shitload of lyrics, none of them ever got used. But I had been living in California, maybe I’d got California-ised, so although I was going home to rehearse with these guys, it was like going home but not really knowing where you were.

Tony Iommi : I don’t remember how I felt - if the band was finished. We were a bit lost at that point. It was very difficult time all round. We just tried to carry on. Dave Walker came in and we did a couple of things with him and that didn’t really work out.
Dave Walker : We were in this farmhouse in Worcestershire, England, and then we went down to Wales just outside of Monmouth. Dave Edmonds had a studio across the street. We were rehearsing and messing about.
I didn’t know Geezer was supposed to be the main lyricist. I was the only one writing lyrics, as I recall.
I had just read my first Stephen King book, Salem’s Lot, and we were staying in this old water mill, it was hundreds of years old. Geezer Butler took the attic upstairs and he wanted to borrow the book, and I said it was kind of scary. His bedroom light was on for ten days, we’d go outside in the middle of the night and his light would be on cause he was nervous. So don’t be falling for all those upside down crosses folks.

Tony Iommi : It didn’t feel right with Dave Walker. It really didn’t. We were such a band unit before, and when somebody new comes in it was really uncomfortable. Dave wasn’t the right singer for us anyway. He was definitely a blues singer, because he’s done stuff before with Fleetwood Mac and Savoy Brown.
Dave Walker : And then Ozzy came out - Ozzy’s a real nice dude - and I felt really sorry for him because he was going through some awful crap at the time. I felt, like, "You know what? Ozzy’s really not sure about what he’s doing, if he did the right thing, quitting Black Sabbath.’

1978

1978 Jan 4 : Ozzy decides to re-join Black Sabbath.
Dave Walker : I showed up for rehearsal. As I walked in, the band announced that they were going to the local pub for a meeting and that I was to wait until they got back. When they did, Bill Ward spoke for the band and said, and I quote, “We’re still here, and you’re not”. That was it.

Tony Iommi : It didn’t work (with Walker) and we were glad when Ozzy came back. But of course, when he did come back we were due to go to Toronto to record an album, and we had no songs, really, because Ozzy didn’t want to sing the songs that we’d written with Dave Walker.

1978 Jan 20 : Ozzy Osbourne’s father dies. The song Junior’s Eyes on Never Say Die is about this death.
David Tangye (Ozzy’s PA) : When Ozzy's dad died, Ozzy came down to Fields Farm to mourn, he was dressed in a dark suit which he tore off his back and threw in the fire! He then proceeded to the local pub, The Dolphin, with makeshift clothes fashioned out of two black bin bags.  

Jan - May 1978 : recording their eighth studio album, Never Say Die, at Sound Interchange, Toronto, Canada.
Tony Iommi : I don’t know how we got that album done. I booked the studio out in Toronto, never having seen it in my life. I booked it because the Stones had used it. But when we got there, it was just too plush, it wasn’t right for us. I had all the carpet ripped up because it just sounded dead in there. We had to rehearse in the morning at this cinema, and it was fucking freezing cold. And then at night we’d go into the studio to record. You wanted to live with the songs for a little bit. So it was very hard to put that album together, very frustrating for us all.

Tony Iommi : Why Toronto? Because of the tax, really. The studio was booked through brochures because people thought it might be a good one. We got there and it had a dead sound - totally wrong. We couldn't get a real live sound. So what we had to do was rip the carpet up and try to make it as live as we could. They were okay about it, but it took time to get it exactly right. There were no other studios available.

Geezer Butler : It was horrendous. We were in Toronto, broke and miserable and freezing to death. It was minus 18 or something, and I got this cold in my ear and went totally deaf, so everything that I was playing sounded like it was underwater.

Tony Iommi : We were all into silly games...and we were getting really drugged out...We'd go down to the sessions and have to pack up because we were too stoned. Nobody could get anything right. We were all over the place. Everybody was playing a different thing.

Geezer Butler : He’d gone nuts, Bill. He was dressing up as Hitler in the studio. And one day he passed out in the studio, so Tony put all of this black gaffer tape on his head, as if it were a Hitler haircut. When Bill came round from whatever he was on, he realized that his whole head was stuck down with tape.

Bill Ward : In the circumstances, I thought we did the best we could. We were taking care of business ourselves, we didn't have millions from the record company and, despite the booze and Ozzy's departure, we tried to experiment with jazz and stuff the way we had in the early days. Songs like Johnny Blade and Air Dance I still like.

Geezer Butler : I like Air Dance. It was a great track, and totally different to what we’d normally do. But even if they were the best songs we’d ever done, I’d still get a bad feeling from listening to that album. For us, it puts you back in that period. And we were really having a horrible time back then.

Ozzy Osbourne : I'd go down to the studio and I heard what sounded like a jazz band playing. Is this really Black Sabbath? I'd just fuck off.

Breakout was stretching it too far for me. With tracks like that on the album, we might as well have been called Slack Haddock, not Black Sabbath. The only impressive thing about a jazz band as far as I was concerned was how much they could drink.

Tony Iommi : In Toronto we had these apartments in a block of about seven or eight floors. When we finished the sessions we used to go down to the engineer’s room, and he’d roll a couple of spliffs. Then I’d walk upstairs to my room on the outside steps instead of the lift, because I didn’t want anybody to see me stoned.
This one night, I’d had a joint and you know when you’ve had enough. I went up the stairs, put the key in the door, walked in, and all the room was different. I thought, what’s happened here? It was really peculiar. I walked into the bedroom and there were two people in the bed. They saw me and started screaming. It frightened the life out of them. And I shit myself too. It freaked me out like you wouldn’t believe. What happened was I’d counted the floors wrong, and went on to the floor beneath mine. But my key fitted their door. And you know, they could have bloody shot me. That was a horrible experience. Probably worse for them - seeing me coming in, the way I looked.

1978 May 16 : Black Sabbath begin the Never Say Die! tour at City Hall, Newcastle on Tyne, with Van Halen as support act.
Tony Iommi : We were burnt out and had come to a stage in our lives when the band was not right. When we did that tour, Van Halen were really hot to trot, whereas we were established, but burning out. And there’s these guys all ready to go, and they were really good. They were great musicians, energetic onstage. We were good friends with Van Halen. We had them on tour with us for eight months. Eddie Van Halen became one of my best friends. Eddie was the first guitarist I’d heard come up with the tapping method. And he was a great player. But that tour was difficult. We hit a wall. We didn’t know where we were going, and Van Halen were really going somewhere. They were jumping all over the stage, and we were like old farts in comparison. But they used to be side of stage every night watching us. You could see that they wanted to learn. And they did. They worked hard and really did good. We’d gone as far as we could at that point.

Geezer Butler : Ozzy thought that David Lee Roth was ripping him off every night, which he was. The thing is, Van Halen were getting all these young girls at the shows, and we’d never had that. We were going, ‘What are all these women doing at our shows?’ And of course, they were screaming when Van Halen were on. Then we’d go on and there’d be no screaming, just the odd bloke clapping. We didn’t give a toss. We knew we had our crowd and Van Halen had theirs – which was more vociferous because of the girls. But Ozzy just took the whole thing to heart. He totally lost confidence in himself.

Geezer Butler : Ozzy completely lost confidence on that tour. Our record company, Warner Brothers, had put everything into Van Halen. They really wanted to build them up. And we were sort of old hat to them. Van Halen were getting limos everywhere, and we hardly had any money back then. We’d just got rid of our management, paying horrendous lawyers bills and everything. The record company didn’t really believe in us anymore. And by the end of that tour, Ozzy was in pieces.

1978 Jun 1 : Black Sabbath play at Hammersmith Odeon, London, UK, supported by Van Halen.


1978 Jun 19 : Black Sabbath end a UK tour at Hammersmith Odeon, London, with Van Halen as support.

1978 Aug 22 : Black Sabbath begin the first leg of a massive North American tour at Milwaukee Arena, Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, with Van Halen in support.

1978 Sep 23 : When Black Sabbath play at Anaheim Stadium, Anaheim, California, USA, support band Van Halen is seen to parachute down to the venue from a plane flying overhead. It is, however, a publicity gimmick using stunt men instead of the band. Also on the bill are Richie Lecea, Sammy Hagar and Boston.
Eddie Van Halen : That was one of Roth's big ideas. I'm not even sure why, but he said, 'Let's parachute into the stadium.' Of course, we couldn't do it ourselves, so we hired four professional sky divers to jump out of an airplane before our set.

The idea was that we would wear identical gear and run on stage and pretend it was us that jumped out of the plane. So there we were, wearing these crazy, heavy outfits, sweating our balls off, waiting for the sky divers to come down so we could jump on stage.

It was silly, and it almost turned into a complete catastrophy, because while we were trying to get out of the gear, Al severely twisted his ankle and had to play the show with practically a broken foot.

1978 Sep 28 : Black Sabbath release the album Never Say Die in the USA.
Ozzy Osbourne : The last album I did with Sabbath was Never Say Die! and it was the worst piece of work that I've ever had anything to do with. I'm ashamed of that album. I think it's disgusting

1978 Oct 1 : Black Sabbath release their eighth album Never Say Die! in the UK. This will prove to be the last full studio album featuring the entire original line-up of the group.

1978 Dec 11 : Black Sabbath’s current North American tour ends with the second of two nights at Tingley Coliseum, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA.


1979 :

No tour and no new album

Apr 27, 1979 : The other members of Sabbath decide they’ve finally had enough of Ozzy’s erratic drink and drug-fuelled behaviour, so they sack him.

Tony Iommi : We had some chats with Ozzy. Whether he’d remember them or not, I don’t know. I was in a terrible position, because I was the one who used to go to meetings with the record company. I’d go over to Warner Brothers and they’d say: ‘How’s the album coming along?’ ‘Oh, alright.’ ‘When can we hear some tracks?’ ‘Um, soon…’ I was lying. It just wasn’t happening. We were coming up with riffs, but Ozzy just wasn’t into it anymore. He’d done too much of everything. A lot of times when we were working, he’d be asleep on a couch.
It wasn’t just my decision to fire him. It was a decision made by all three of us. It was Bill who told him. Ozzy probably thought I was behind it all, but it was a band decision. It was either we break up or we carry on without him.

Ozzy Osbourne : We were doing some rehearsals in L.A., and I was loaded, but then I was loaded all the time. It was obvious that Bill (Ward) had been sent by the others, because he wasn’t exactly the firing type.” Ozzy continued, “I can’t remember exactly what he said to me…but the gist was that Tony thought I was a pissed, coked-up loser and a waste of time for everyone concerned.

Tony Iommi : Ozzy seems to think it was me who pushed it, but I was only speaking on behalf of the band and trying to get the thing going. Somebody had to make a move, somebody had to do something otherwise we’d still be there now and we’d all be out of it. So that was it.

We had been together for a decade, but it got to a point where we couldn’t relate to each other any more. There were so many drugs flying around, coke and Quaaludes and Mandrax, and there was booze and late nights and women and everything else. And then you get more paranoid and you think, they hate me. We never fought, but it’s hard to get through to people, to communicate and solve things when everybody’s out of it.

Ozzy Osbourne : We were just a fucking bunch of guys drowning in the fucking ocean. We weren't getting along with each other and we were all fucked-up with drugs and alcohol. And I got fired. It was just a bad thing. You try to lift your head up above water, but eventually the tide sucks you under.

Geezer Butler : Ozzy was incapable of working. He was 100% out of his brains all the time.

1979 Jun 6 : It is announced that Ozzy Osbourne might soon be leaving Black Sabbath. Rumours suggest that drug and drink abuse is making him unreliable.
Tony Iommi : I got in touch with Ronnie (James Dio). Through Sharon, I might add. I met Ronnie at a party. I really didn’t feel happy with the way things were going. I thought about doing something with Ronnie. And then when we split with Ozzy, I said to the others, ‘Well, why don’t we try Ronnie?’

As soon as we heard Ronnie sing with us, we knew he was the right man.


1979 June : Ronnie James Dio joins Sabbath as Ozzy’s replacement.

Tony Iommi : He had so much against him, Ronnie. It was so hard for him to walk into a band as established as we were, and he wasn’t a big chap, just a little guy. (Sabbath manager) Don Arden’s words were: ‘You can’t have a midget singing for Black Sabbath.’ I just looked at the size of the talent. He sang so well. It was different to what we’d done, but there wasn’t much else we could do. We’d heard the Rainbow albums with Ronnie singing. I thought we had to try to see what we could do with him. We started writing completely differently, because Ronnie was such a different kind of singer. If we had got another singer who sounded like Ozzy, I think that would have been worse. It had to be something different. The music we wrote with him was a different approach.

Ozzy Osbourne : I couldn’t imagine someone singing for that band that wasn’t me. It takes a long time to get that into your head.
Tony Iommi : It was like we were starting over again. But it made us fight again. We’d lost that – you get too comfortable. It made us have to work again, it kicked us up the arse, and that was good for the band.
Geezer Butler : One of the reasons I loved Ronnie was that he would write his own lyrics. I’d had enough of that after Never Say Die! For me, writing lyrics had become like torture. And Ronnie’s lyrics were totally different to what I’d do. When Ronnie came in, he took the band in another direction. It was really good.
Tony Iommi : They were totally different altogether. Not only voice-wise, but attitude-wise. Ozzy was a great showman, but when Dio came in, it was a different attitude, a different voice and a different musical approach, as far as vocals. Dio would sing across the riff, whereas Ozzy would follow the riff, like in Iron Man. Ronnie came in and gave us another angle on writing.

Geoff Nicholls (guitarist, Quartz) : I actually joined up with Black Sabbath in July 1979, originally for two weeks but as you know stayed until 2004. Working with Sabbath was a complete joy for 99 percent of the time, we had a lot of fun and worked hard on the music.  But as with all bands, there were those odd moments when people’s views differed and members went their separate ways to find new challenges.


May - Sep 1979 : After the breakup of Sabbath, Ozzy spends several months in a Los Angeles hotel room (Le Parc) getting high and drunk non-stop. Sharon Arden (Don Arden's daughter) came to collect an old debt from Ozzy and saw the sad state he was in. Sharon convinces Ozzy to get back on his feet and back into music.

Ozzy Osbourne : I just stayed in that room and got fucked up. I thought, Black Sabbath was a big thing that happened to me, but it’s over. So I’ll have my last blast with the booze and dope, and fuck as many tarts as I can, and then go home. But I didn’t fuck the tarts because I was too pissed. And then, one day, Sharon came round…

Sharon Osbourne : He looked awful. He hadn’t shaved in weeks. His clothes were covered in food and he smelt terrible. It was heartbreaking to see somebody in such a state of hopelessness.

Sharon Osbourne : It started with cleaning himself up. Then trying to cut back on the booze and the drugs. And then you start to take him out and people recognize him and tell him he looks good. And when people asked him what he’s doing, he’d start saying, ‘I’m auditioning musicians.’ It’s not just like, ‘I’m not doing anything.’ It’s, ‘I’m here, I’m putting a band together. And it makes you feel like, ‘Hey, yeah, I’m doing something.’



Ozzy Osbourne : After I got fired from Sabbath, I was very fortunate in meeting (Quiet Riot guitarist) Randy Rhoads, God rest his soul. He was great with me, and I felt like I did have something that was worth it.

Ozzy Osbourne : When you’re starting a project off for the first time you’ve got everything to gain and nothing to lose.

They (Don Arden and Sharon) wanted me to call my band Son Of Sabbath and I said, ‘Keep on fucking dreaming.’ All this stupid stuff.
I got fired from Black Sabbath. But every record I did with Black Sabbath was a major hit. I had no idea going into my solo thing that it was ever going to get off the ground. I thought, we’ll make a record, and at least I’ve made a record of my own.
Of course there was bad blood. I didn’t want them to beat me and they didn’t want me to beat them. It spurred us on. They made a couple of great albums without me. I was pissed off. I was vengeful. But there came a point when I went, I’m free.

1979 Sep : Ozzy returns to London, meets Bob Daisley, former bassist of Rainbow.
David Tangye (Ozzy’s PA) : Ozzy was quite up for the new challenge as I suppose it was his make or break time! I had kept in touch with Ozzy since the 1977 AC/DC outing, and had visited him several times during this period. It was like a new day for Ozzy with plenty of interest from others to get him back out on the road and doing what he should be doing! He had no record deal as such back then, so had no budget to play with. I worked on his first UK tour (Sep 1980), and on his first solo US tour.

Sep 1979 : Geezer Butler briefly leaves Sabbath for 'personal reasons'. He will return in Jan 1980.

Nov 1979 : Sabbath enters Criteria Studios to record Heaven And Hell
Tony Iommi : I had an excitement about the band again. I had to keep this band going. I’ve never been one to give up. I had to fight and to try and make it work. It would have been so easy to have turned my back on it and just said, ‘That’s it.’ But I couldn’t do that. I had to go with it and make it work. And it did. Heaven And Hell turned out to be great album. Black Sabbath hadn’t died. We were back out there with Ronnie and the band was great again.

1979 Nov : Daisley meets Rhoads and ex-Uriah Heep drummer Lee Kerslake is brought in.

1980 : Sharon Arden becomes Ozzy’s manager, later marries him.
1980 : Ozzy’s band tours a few local pub gigs under the name "Law" before settling on "Blizzard of Ozz".

1980 Mar 22 : Blizzard Of Ozz begin recording at Ridge Farm Studios, Surrey, UK.

-----------------------------------------------------
SOURCES : Interviews conducted by Johnny Black and Paul Elliott, plus pre-existing quotes from :
Classic Rock
Jeb Wright interview at Classic Rock Revisited website
Ultimate Guitar, 13 Feb 2010
Guitar World, 1992, 2001 and 2008
Mojo 2013
Uncut 2014
After Hours 1981
Sounds 1978
Melody Maker, Harry Doherty interview 11 Oct 1975; Chris Charlesworth interview 24 July 1976.
Spin magazine interview with Kory Grow.
Drum Magazine interview by Andrew Lentz, Sep 2010
Sleeve notes to the CD re-issue of Paranoid
Sleeve notes to 1998 LP Reunion.


Website : http://davewalkerband.com/black-sabbath-dave/)
Website : http://dmme.net/interviews/dwalker.html)
Website : Jason Saulnier at http://musiclegends.ca/interviews/dave-walker-interview-black-sabbath/)
Website : Interview by Shawn Perry at http://www.vintagerock.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=46:glenn-hughes&catid=35:glenn-hughes&Itemid=3
Website metalshrine.se

Promoter Don Branker quotes at : Black Sabbath FAQ
https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=JEXhxPrdWS4C&pg=PA36&lpg=PA36&dq=%22Mark+Foster%22,+%22Black+Sabbath%22&source=bl&ots=n4TqbVo8w7&sig=e12zMWs_20_DnLUAp1EqS3kQQ_0&hl=en&sa=X&ei=kwetVPg8x9lqjMyBeA&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22Mark%20Foster%22%2C%20%22Black%20Sabbath%22&f=false

Symptom Of The Universe by Mick Wall (book)
I Am Ozzy by Ozzy Osbourne
Iron Man by Tony Iommi
How Black Was Our Sabbath by David Tangye and Graham Wright.

DVD documentary Black Sabbath, Volume 1: 1970 - 1978