Is there anything to say about Black Sabbath that hasn’t already been said? It’s not just that they’re icons of heavy metal, but the world of music would be completely different were it not for them. They brought about a brand-new sound, look and completely unmatched energy. Otherworldly in its execution and yet utterly relatable simultaneously, it was something to be marvelled at.
The band’s real power is contained within its first two albums. Recorded not long after one another, they were laced with time constraints and the product of a band flooded with ideas that came from a long time playing together. This meant that the best material out of all Sabbath’s catalogue was recorded, and the time constraints meant that a lot of it had to be captured live. This created a raw-sounding energy that the band never really seemed able to replicate afterwards.
Though they still recorded a series of classic albums, Sabbath became slightly stung by the fact that there were no time limitations and they had access to technology they didn’t have before. This meant they tried to experiment a bit more with their sound, such as on Master of Reality, which may be commendable but didn’t resonate quite as much as some of their earlier work.
That being said, the band’s musical talent, paired with the technology that was suddenly available to them, might not have made for the best Black Sabbath albums, but it did allow them to build an atmosphere in their music. It meant that they became the perfect band for soundtracks and were subsequently asked to do the music for the Heavy Metal movie.
“That was just basically a bass intro; Geez [Geezer Butler] was responsible for that. I just put a bit of guitar on it. It was for the Heavy Metal movie, and they wanted this effect thing, where all these monsters were walking, were changing, and they wanted some music to go with that,” once said Tony Iommi, reflecting on recording one of the songs for the soundtrack.
He continued, “That’s why that was recorded. We recorded that actually at John Lennon’s house. In his studio, it was 5150. We put that together there. We went there to record [the song] ‘Mob Rules’ and to use the studio and use Lennon’s engineer, too.”
Despite the recording session taking place after Lennon had passed away, Iommi couldn’t help but feel slightly starstruck when looking around the house and seeing equipment he remembered from music videos. “He’d been dead a while. But the house was exactly the same,” he said.
“I don’t know if you have ever seen the ‘Imagine’ video where you’ve got the white piano. That’s actually where we wrote ‘The Mob Rules’, in that room,” he recalled, “We set the gear up and it was all Lennon’s gear as well; we didn’t have any of our equipment.”
Access to highly professional gear sometimes worked for Sabbath; for instance, it was perfect when it came to applying effects for a monster-orientated soundtrack. However, this kind of tech was also a hindrance a lot of the time for Sabbath.
