IF you play video games you’ll perhaps have heard it on Guitar Hero 3, or Freestyle BMX 2. Enjoy films? It’s shown up in everything from Dazed And Confused to Suicide Squad, even the Angry Birds Movie. If you’re either of a certain age or a fan of archival British pop shows, you may even have witnessed its appearance on Top Of The Pops, and marvelled at a long-haired band at sea within a bopping studio audience, a hard-rocking albums outfit, quite unused to this kind of thing.
Such was and remains the peculiar reach of Black Sabbath’s “Paranoid”, two and a bit minutes which helped unlock new worlds for the band: the singles charts, television, instant recognition. Pedants have suggested the song doesn’t stand up to clinical evaluation, but the power of the music – a choppy riff , a simple vocal melody, an ancient-sounding guitar solo – remains undeniable.
During its 50 years of service so far, it’s been misheard (during the mid-1980s “satanic panic”, concerned parents heard its lyric to be “I tell you to end your life”, not “to enjoy life”), extensively covered (by, to name a few notables, Mötley Crüe, Ministry and Weezer) and, though unrepresentative of their epic, doomy riffing, widely adored by fans. “We played it on the last Sabbath tour,” guitarist Tony Iommi tells Uncut down the line from his Midlands home. “It’s still very popular.”
It’s fair to say that in 1970, neither Black Sabbath nor their new audience quite expected anything like “Paranoid”. Originally a band called Earth, formed out of a mutual love of heavy blues, the band quickly took things in a more extreme direction, changing their name to Black Sabbath, and spreading their very loud word via European residencies (at Hamburg’s Star-Club, among others) and UK gigs from Low Hesket village hall to the Pied Bull pub in Islington.
“By the time we got to Regent Sound they’d been playing The Star-Club for six 45-minute sets a night,” recalls their first manager, Jim Simpson. “At the weekends they played eight 45s a night. By the time they came back to Britain they were like finely trained racehorses.”
The band’s scarifying debut album was just the start of their spectacular 1970. With an oversupply of material for just one record, the band were developing their follow-up while still promoting their first album. They still needed a few minutes more to turn what they had into a full length album – and what they came up with proved decisive.
OZZY OSBOURNE [vocals]: We were made by a man called Jim Simpson, who used to have a club called Henry’s Blueshouse. We used to carry our equipment around in case someone didn’t turn up; we’d say, “We’ll play.” It was hand to mouth in the beginning.
JIM SIMPSON [sabbath manager, 1969-1970]: People think they were a drug-crazed band, biting the heads off alligators, but they weren’t. They were very serious young men, dedicated to their music. We’d have band meetings: every Wednesday morning when they weren’t on the road, a business meeting in my office with an agenda. One day in the midst of all this, Geezer came in late. He leaned round the door and said “I’ve got it.” What you got? “The name.” I can still remember his facial expression to this day: “Black Sabbath.” There was a collective intake of breath. That led them to write the song “Black Sabbath” and that pointed the direction they were going to go in.
TONY IOMMI [guitar]: There was no-one doing this sort of thing, we had to break down the barriers. A lot of people just didn’t understand us and were quite honestly frightened of us in the early days. They were quite frightened to come and meet us or talk to us or anything. It was very strange. Because of the image that was built up around the band.
SIMPSON: To steal a band, especially from a provincial manager, was natural. Don Arden sent Carl Wayne from The Move, but he failed. The band came back and told me about the meeting they had in the Wimpy Bar on Smallbrook Queensway. Then Don decided to send his heavier men. I thought I was safe because of my relationship with the band. We all shook hands solemnly to be loyal for the rest of our lives.
GEEZER BUTLER [bass]: We’d already got half of Paranoid at the same time as the first album, it just wouldn’t all fit on one record. We’d written “War Pigs”: it was called “Walpurgis” back then. When the record company wanted to know what the next album would be called, we said that we’d got a song called “Walpurgis” and we wanted to call it that. They said, “What does that mean?” And we said, it’s Satan’s Christmas. And they said, “No thank you.”
SIMPSON: Paranoid was a superb album especially when you consider that they were touring constantly and they were given six months by the record company to deliver the next album. They did it on the road, in the band van, working on ideas and lyrics and, when they got to the gig, the soundcheck was their rehearsal time. We had a producer, Rodger Bain, he didn’t do much. It took me a while to realise that was pure fucking genius: don’t mess with something if it’s right. It takes a lot for a producer to do that, to sit on his hands.
TOM ALLOM [engineer]: We did the tracks for Paranoid in Regent Sound on Tottenham Court Road, then we went to Island and did all the vocals on eight-track. When I listened back to the four tracks, it was all rough scat vocals, nothing finished. On Paranoid there wasn’t even a title, it was just listed as “Single”.
IOMMI: I don’t know if you’ve seen any photos of that session where we’re all sat around in the studio, but I’ve got this black eye. In them days it was the long-haired ones and the skinheads – and we were in a big fight. We were in some seaside resort or other and Geezer came out to use the phone box. He was talking to our manager at that time about how we were going to get paid. He got surrounded by all these skinheads while in the phone box. He managed to get away and come back inside and he said, “I’ve just got surrounded by all these lunatics wanting to beat us up.” So of course we thought, ‘All right then.’ We grabbed a mic-stand and Ozzy grabbed a hammer and went outside. It was a right old bloodbath.
ALLOM: Bill Ward had his foot in plaster! It was his high-hat leg. Just as well it wasn’t his bass drum foot! They’d had a bit of a to-do with some skinheads and Bill had climbed up a lamppost to get away, then fallen off. I remember thinking, ‘How the fuck are we going to do this album if the drummer’s got his leg in plaster?’
IOMMI: It got very violent, skinheads used to wear these big boots and kick you in the head. We had a good go. It was pretty gruesome. They’re taking photos for the album and there’s me with a big shiner!
BUTLER: The very last thing we did in the studio was “Paranoid” – we had three minutes to fill for it to be a legal album.
ALLOM: We only had seven tracks so we were short of an album. You want to give the punters at least 18 minutes a side. I liked to keep the sides under 20 minutes so you can cut the discs nice and loud. We needed another track. We went over the boozer to ruminate while Tony stayed behind to see if he could come up with anything. He came up with this riff. He came running in and said, “I’ve got it!”
IOMMI: “Paranoid” was basically a filler track. The producer said we needed to come up with a short song. We were only short by a few minutes so it needed to be uptempo. If I’d done a slow one we’d have filled the time before it got to the vocal!
ALLOM: Every label wanted every band to have one single if not two on their album, whoever they were – and it put constraints on their writing. I don’t think Black Sabbath, certainly at that stage of their career, would ever have dreamed of writing a song as a single. That wasn’t their remit – they just played their music.
IOMMI: I just had the riff and then we jammed it. We had it down. Ozzy mumbled something before he had the lyrics and then he and Geezer worked on it. It’s one of the simplest songs we’d ever done. It fell into place very quick. Like with the first album, it had to be done quick: time was money. It was like doing a gig, we played and that was it. The fuzz on the solo? Rodger Bain and Tom Allom put it through some kind of sound generator to make it sound like that.
ALLOM: I can’t remember what it was. Rodger worked out of Trident studios and he might have got it from there. It was a fuzz box of some kind – and quite difficult to make work as we had basic equipment there. I can’t remember if we did that at Regent or Island. We had various devices we used: on “Iron Man” we used a ring modulator. Tony didn’t have any pedals of his own, he just went straight in and cranked everything up and got deafeningly loud.
SIMPSON: Sabbath were essentially an albums band but Tony Hall Enterprises, who we worked with, were all about singles. Our first tilt at the singles charts was [debut single] “Evil Woman”, which was someone else’s song, and didn’t do anything. The words ‘hit single’ didn’t enter our lexicon. I don’t recall the single doing anything – except getting us some radio play courtesy of Tony Hall’s energy.
ALLOM: I was at work one day and the guy I was working with at the studio had a Melody Maker and he said, “That album you did is at No 1!”
SIMPSON: We never saw ourselves as a singles band – not that we weren’t knocked to the floor by having “Paranoid” be a hit. “Paranoid” was all about TV. Back where we sat then, the idea of Black Sabbath on Top Of The Pops was ludicrous. It was fantasy. When we were offered it, we didn’t want to do it.
OSBOURNE: Top Of The Pops was nerve-wracking. I don’t like doing TV very much – this lens with half the planet watching you.
IOMMI: It got us a different audience, which was screaming kids. We didn’t really like it because as far as we were concerned we were serious musicians. We didn’t want to be up there dancing about – it was peculiar to us. It felt strange – we were on there with Cilla Black and Cliff Richard. We met a few of them in the bar. I was a big fan of Cliff and the Shadows in the early days. One of the people who worked for us went to watch Cilla Black and shouted, “Have you got any chocolates?” She used to do an advert for chocolates in those days. It was a bit embarrassing, really.
BUTLER: After Top Of The Pops we were getting all these teenage girls coming to the gigs. They were climbing onstage and molesting us while we played. That was the good part. But we knew that if we carried on like that we’d just be another pop band. So we deliberately said, “No more singles”. All critics were quite sneery about us. We were doing great: Paranoid was a No 1 album.
SIMPSON: When Patrick Meehan and Wilf Pine left Don Arden to set up World Wide Artists, they made a more concerted effort to take Black Sabbath from me. They took them on the train to London first-class, told them that if a gig was more than 100 miles away they should be going by helicopter. They took them to the Speakeasy. There was I in my front room in my house in a suburb of Birmingham. They had rented offices in Mayfair. I must have looked very insignificant to them. It wasn’t the best move, but they were just kids, they didn’t know any better. The week I lost the band I had a No 1 album with Paranoid, a No 4 single with “Paranoid” and a No 17 album on the chart with Black Sabbath which had come back on to the chart. So I didn’t really first-hand get all the benefits from “Paranoid”, but I did get a great deal of satisfaction.
This article originally appeared in Uncut’s October 2020 issue [Take 281]. Buy Uncut’s Ultimate Music Guide to Black Sabbath here.