We loved having a laugh, getting stoned and drunk together.”Īrchive shots of Sabbath larking with air rifles on the riverbank suggest a Boy’s Own adventure, yet Rockfield’s rural idyll was far from the dystopian track-listing now taking form. It was sort of a paid holiday for us – we were very close, us against the world sort of thing. We still lived in Brum with our parents at the time, so any chance to travel out of the inner city, we gladly took. We were four kids from Aston, just glad to be living our dream. “There was an old barn where we set up,” Butler recalls, “but when we started playing, part of the roof fell in because of the volume. Working the live circuit across Europe, while snatching days for writing sessions, the band finally came to rest at Rockfield Studios in Wales, where pre-production with trusted producer Rodger Bain literally blew the roof off.
If we liked the songs, that was all we needed.” With Paranoid, we only had ourselves to please. The critics were brutal on our first album, so when it was successful it showed they were way out of touch with what was happening. It meant we could go ahead and write all original material for Paranoid. “Success gave us confidence in our writing. “The first album was signed on the strength of Evil Woman, a cover song, and Warning was a cover song as well,” says Butler. Origins, perhaps, were less important than originality. But with media daggers drawn and the threat of conscription on the cards – or, even worse, a return to the abattoirs and welding factories they’d just escaped – Butler, guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward and singer Ozzy Osbourne were still running as hard as they could. Despite the best efforts of a snide rock press and an apathetic record industry, the band’s self-titled debut album had been a transatlantic success, reaching No.8 in the UK and No.23 in the US. Sabbath had already put a little distance between themselves and reality. The love-ins and protests were all in vain.” A lot of my lyrics were my disappointment that the love era was just a pipe dream. But by the time we wrote the Paranoid album reality had set in. I went to the love-ins at Woburn Abbey in sixty-seven and sixty-eight, with kaftan, beads, and flowers in my hair. “I was really into flower power in the sixties.
“I was scared stiff that we’d be dragged into Vietnam, and World War Three seemed a very real event,” Sabbath’s bassist and lyricist Geezer Butler says, a half-century later.
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