THE MARKING OF BLACK SABBATH
Black Sabbath’s incredible debut album opens with the sound of a storm and an air of deathly foreboding. Rain cascades, thunder cracks and a lone funeral bell begins to toll, as stark and chilling now as it must have been when it first pealed out 50 whole years ago.
It’s a fitting introduction to the most influential album in the history of metal. Half a century on, the bell that was meant to signify the end of someone – or something – instead symbolises the opposite: the starting point of an entirely new strain of music, a kind that endures today.
Sabbath weren’t the first to take the blues and encase it in concrete and steel. But no band, and no album, has so perfectly defined an entire genre. All of heavy metal’s soul is right there in Black Sabbath’s first record.
No one expected it to turn out the way it did, and certainly not the four original members of Black Sabbath. But that landmark debut album – released on February 13, 1970, a date loaded with portent – remains as imposing as an ancient monolith.
This is how Black Sabbath invented metal as we know it.
Guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward spent the first half of 1968 living in Carlisle and playing with heavy blues outfit Mythology. But that band fell apart after they were busted for possession of hash. The pair returned to Birmingham, chastened but unwilling to give up on the dream of playing music.
“We went into a music shop and we saw this advert saying ‘Ozzy
