On Black Sabbath

In December 1999, when I was 17, I boarded a Megabus in the darkness of an early winter morning and journeyed from Preston to Birmingham. I was travelling to watch Black Sabbath perform what was then billed as their final show - The Last Supper. I imagine everything outside the window seemed oddly hushed as the dawn gradually arrived, the scenery brightening palely as it passed, but I don’t really remember the journey.

The gig itself, though, is something I still carry with me. Not as particularly sharply detailed memories, more as a kind of imprint.

Articulating what I mean is important, isn’t it? How to explain?

As a teenager who was into guitar music in the late 90s, it was often difficult to distinguish between what was “good” and what was not. The critical landscape was both totemic and unstable. Artists who had been dismissed in their time - ridiculed, ignored - were now in the process of being reclaimed as visionaries. The music press, the arbiters of this decision-making, was full of retrospective reverence. It was not unusual to see the once unpopular records by bands if yesteryear described as “misunderstood” or “ahead of their time.” 

As a result, I found it almost impossible to trust my own instincts. I liked Marilyn Manson. Was Marilyn Manson good? I liked Korn. Were they good? What about the Deftones? Limp Bizkit? It was hard to say. I liked them and yet I suspected they were not good. They certainly weren’t taken seriously as artists by the mainstream press, but then again neither had all those now reappraised bands - Japan, The Stooges, Slowdive. Equally, for each of these bands there were dozens of others who received similarly brutal reviews yet who the critics, rightly, has not sought to rehabilitate. I worried that I might conclude the bands I liked were in fact not good and do away with their CDs only for someone else, in ten years’ time, to come along and authoritatively declare that they actually had been good all along, and there would be me, someone who had listened to their music - enjoyed it even - but nonetheless failed to recognise their greatness for myself. It was hard work.

With Black Sabbath, though, there was no such doubt. By the time I encountered them they had already passed through the fire of dismissal and come out canonised. I knew from the music press that their predecessors had called them crude, primitive, stupid, and yet they had emerged, decades later, triumphant on the far shore, bathed now in an unimpeachable critical adulation. 

At that time, I was slowly building a rather awkward CD collection, largely obtained from Townsend Records, a tiny CD shop in the high street of my home town, where the classic albums of rock history could be found two for £10. I would select my purchases with great care, bring them home, stack them in alphabetical order beside my stereo and carefully read the liner notes while the music played, as though trying to teach myself how to listen properly.

Somehow, other similar bands from the same discount section - AC/DC, Iron Maiden, Van Halen - just didn’t have that quality. I listened, dutifully, but always felt faintly embarrassed by them. They seemed so… silly. With Black Sabbath though - I purchased their first six albums one after another via that two-for-£10 offer - I felt something else entirely. Not just enjoyment, but something deeper and stranger. Here were songs about the devil, about wizards and graveyards - frequently inarticulate songs about these subjects too. By all rights these songs should strike me as equally silly, and yet they sank into me like stones.  

I suppose I simply loved them, in the way one can only love something that appears at exactly the right moment in your life and explains something you didn’t really realise needed explaining.

I would lie on my bed, in our suburban family home in Lancashire, and listen over and over to these songs - N.I.B., Children of the Grave, Supernaut - transported to the distant-seeming 1970s of their composition, but also, via some cosmic crack the music seemed to prise open, to another kind of time, neither present nor fully past: Planet Caravan, Sleeping Village, Hand of Doom, here was music that felt to me as though it had been beamed in from elsewhere. I’d read my Jack Kerouac, my Hubert Selby Jr, but I’d find myself drifting from the page, beguiled and barely comprehending the beguilement I was under.

The centre of that sound, for me, was always Tony Iommi, a real hero of mine, who had lost the ends of his fingers in an accident on his last day at the factory where he worked and had invented a new way to play the guitar. I’m not sure I would have fully formulated it in this way at the time, but there was something profound in his guitar playing: taking injury, restriction, limitation, and turning it into something new. There was a profundity too in the sounds he created. Those aching solos which seemed to have been transmitted from some eternal midnight, those sludgy robotic riffs which find their place in your own internal rhythm: here was music I simply wanted to live in.

Looking back though, it seems patently wrong to have thought of him as its sole author. The band’s long and patchy post-Ozzy years make that clear enough. Without Osbourne’s voice, the machinery continued to move, but that spell was broken. Because what Ozzy brought - what Ozzy was really - could not be replicated.

It’s rather disorientating to do the maths and work out that Sabbath’s debut was released just months before the Beatles disbanded. Where the Beatles’ final works sound polished and self-consciously baroque, Sabbath’s first record begins with a single three-note riff repeated, slow, heavy and endless like a warning bell. Over it, Ozzy sings not with any particular technical skill but with something rawer and more unsettling. He is frequently, on this song and elsewhere, at the top of his vocal range, almost attacking the songs he performs on. His voice was mocked at the time of those six albums’ release, but its power is unmistakable. It is not expressive, I don’t think, in the way we are taught to recognise. 

When Black Sabbath announced Back to the Beginning earlier this year, an eye-popping all-star charity performance in Birmingham, I was sorely tempted to return, to hop on another early morning Megabus and experience once again that magic taking place. I didn’t though. Kids, finances, a job, a life. But it did send me spiralling back into the dark, majestic pit of those six records. And I’ve found myself thinking a great deal about art and articulacy.

We are often told, often implicitly, that great art should speak clearly, specifically that it should tell us something about the self. But I’m not so sure. I think Black Sabbath’s music speaks from a different tradition, one in which art arises not from self-knowledge, but from other stuff, exterior stuff: pressure, repetition, boredom, absence, noise.

Perhaps this is why it still moves me. Now, over 25 years on from The Last Supper, I’m someone else, someone who is older, more culturally literate, surrounded by clear ideas of what is and isn’t valuable. And yet Black Sabbath still cuts through. Not with subtlety, nor even with a great deal of clarity, but with a force that bypasses explanation.

Ozzy died last week and I continued my communion with those early records. I listened again and again to that opening track from the debut album - the suspense of the quiet riff, that wicked voice, the music’s eruption into horror - and I felt again that magnetic pull. It’s music that doesn’t want to express, but to make its presence known. Black Sabbath were four young working class men in Birmingham in the late 1960s. They didn’t seek to polish their experience into something refined and articulate. Instead they cranked it up, amplified it, made it louder, darker, sludgier, heavier, weirder. That too is art.