News Story
Black Sabbath was formed in 1968 by Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, Ozzy Osbourne and Bill Ward. All four came from Aston, a working class area in Birmingham. They came from humble beginnings; Ozzy in his biography talks about the ‘bomb pecks’, areas in Aston bombed during World War II that had become wastelands kids used as playgrounds.
Birmingham was an industrial city, known as ‘the city of 1000 trades’. William Hutton, Birmingham's first historian wrote of it in 1723, ‘Birmingham began with the production of the anvil, and probably will end with them. The Sons of the hammer were once her chief inhabitants’. Small factories littered the city, located next to people’s houses, the sound permeating into every part of life and forming the soundtrack to the city.
‘The din of hammers, the rushing of steam and the dead, heavy clanking of engines, was the harsh music which arose from every quarter.’ Charles Dickens, wrote when describing Birmingham in The Pickwick Papers published in 1836.
If you grew up in Birmingham in the 1950s and 60s and didn’t excel at school, you were fated to working in a factory. All four members of the band grew up in this environment and started their own adult lives working there. Geezer talks about how his grandfather and father had worked in factories and the best you could hope for after years of service was a carriage clock on your retirement. Tony, Geezer, Ozzy and Bill wanted a different life and found that escapism from the drudgery of life in music. Attending Henry’s Blues Club regularly they were influenced by the artists who performed there.
Ozzy had been an apprentice at the Lucas Factory, a common place for industrial accidents. Tony worked in a metal sheet cutting factory. What many people don’t realise is that his unique playing style was equal parts accident and design. And, that the specific ‘accident’ in question could have ended his guitar-playing career before it really began. Tony lost the tops of two fingers when a guillotine cut them off. He was distraught and initially considered giving up playing altogether. That was, until the factory foreman gave him a recording of Django Reinhardt, the renowned jazz guitarist and composer, who had continued to play despite sustaining a terrible injury in a fire and losing a number of fingers. Inspired by this, Tony crafted himself some new fingertips and loosened his guitar strings, resulting in the heavy downtuned sound he is so famous for creating.
The band saw the massive queues for people going to see horror films and knew that’s what people wanted, to be scared, a form of escapism for the dull realities of working life. The band had a number of names - first Polka Tulk then Earth – but they found their true identity once they changed their name to that of the 1963 Boris Karloff horror film Black Sabbath.
The first song Black Sabbath on the Black Sabbath album starts with the sound of rain and thunder, and of church bells ringing. The band's aesthetic draws on the ‘hammer horror’ tradition and plays with imagery associated with the occult. The album artwork is a lone figure of a woman dressed in black, staring at you the viewer, making a connection with the audience.
Their music and look was the opposite of the flower power, hippie movement of California - they grew up in a gritty city, at a time when there was a genuine fear of being enlisted for the Vietnam war.
Black Sabbath is the alchemy of what happens when you combine the talents of its four members bring to the music sonically:
- Ozzy’s vocal style is urgent, real and honest. He has so much soul and emotion; everything he experienced and endured, everything he wanted to escape from, came out in his singing, with his incredible, unique voice.
- Tony Iommi is the riff master, the master of his downtuned guitar.
- Geezer Butler is noted for his melodic playing, and for being one of the first bassists to use a wah pedal and to down-tune his instrument - and his lyric writing is so poignant.
- And then you have Bill Ward's drumming, hugely influenced by 1940s Big Band jazz drummers.
In the early years Sabbath were very much rejected by the press both in the UK and the USA, with Lester Bangs describing them as ‘unskilled labourers’, so it was their fans' loyalty that has been key to their success. And they are the most dedicated of fans; once a fan, most people remain fans for life - the band have never been in fashion so they have never been out of fashion. As Bill Ward says, ‘it’s the people's music, it always has been’.
From a presentation to BRB by Lisa Meyer
Metal Curator, Black Sabbath – The Ballet
Artistic Director, CEO of Capsule and founder of Home of Metal
Home of Metal creates exhibitions and events that join the dots between music, social history, visual art and fan culture.
