How Ozzy Osbourne and Black Sabbath found their sound

If you saw Black Sabbath’s first ever gig, you wouldn’t have recognised greatness.

Back in 1968, they had the decidedly less sinister name of The Polka Tulk Blues Band, and came complete with a saxophonist and bottleneck guitar player.

A year later, they’d slimmed down, found a new name and invented heavy metal. Few bands are so inextricably linked with a musical genre, but Sabbath set the template for everyone from Motörhead and AC/DC to Metallica and Guns ‘n’ Roses.

Along the way, singer Ozzy Osbourne, who has died at the age of 76, became one of rock’s most influential figures, with an electrifying and unpredictable stage presence and an almost mythological intake of drugs.

“If anyone has lived the debauched rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle,” he once admitted, “I suppose it’s me.”

So how did these four working class musicians from Aston, Birmingham rewrite the rules of rock?

According to Osbourne, it was a visceral reaction to the “hippy-dippy” songs like San Francisco (Be Sure to Wear Some Flowers In Your Hair) that saturated the airwaves after 1967’s Summer Of Love.

“Flowers in your hair? Do me a favour,” he seethed in his 2010 autobiography.

“The only flowers anyone saw in Aston were the ones you threw in the hole after you when you croaked it at the age of 53 ‘cos you’d worked yourself to death.”

Teaming up with guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward, Osbourne’s initial idea was to put a Brummie spin on the bluesy sound of Fleetwood Mac.

The band’s first name, Polka Tulk, was inspired by a brand of talcum powder his mum used.

After ditching the saxophone, they rebranded as Earth, taking as many gigs as they could manage, and even blagging a few extras.

“Whenever a big name band was coming to town, we’d load up the van with all our stuff and then just wait outside the venue on the off-chance they might not show up,” Osbourne later recalled.

It worked… but only once, when the band were asked to stand in for an absent Jethro Tull. “And after that, all the bookers knew our name,” Ozzy said.

That opportunistic streak also steered them towards their signature sound.

It just so happened that the band’s rehearsal space was directly opposite a cinema that showed all-night horror movies.

Watching audiences flock to these shows, the band conjured a plan.

“Tony said, “Don’t you think it’s strange how people pay money to get frightened? Why don’t we start writing horror music?” Osbourne told music journalist Pete Paphides in 2005. “And that’s what happened.”

The musicians metamorphosed into their final form: Adopting the name Black Sabbath, after a low-budget Boris Karloff film of the same name, they started writing lyrics that dabbled in death, black magic and mental illness.

To suit the material, the music needed to get heavier, too. Ward slowed down the tempo. Iommi turned up the volume. Osbourne developed an aggressive vocal wail that always seemed to be teetering on the precipice of insanity.

But it was Iommi’s guitar playing that really set Sabbath apart. His riffs leapt from the amplifier and hit the audience square in the chest with taurine force.

It was a sound he developed by necessity.

When he was 17, Iommi was working in a sheet metal factory when he lost the tips of his two middle fingers in an industrial accident.

Although surgeons tried to reattach them, they had gone black by the time he reached hospital. It looked like the end of his guitar career.

“The doctors said: ‘The best thing for you to do is to pack up, really. Get another job, do something else’,” Iommi wrote in his autobiography, Iron Man.

Determined to prove them wrong, he melted down a fairy liquid bottle to make protective thimbles for his fingers, and slackened his guitar strings so he wouldn’t have to apply too much pressure on the fretboard to create a note.

After months of painful practice, he learned a new style of playing – using his two good fingers to lay down chords, and adding vibrato to thicken the sound.

That stripped-back, detuned growl became the basis of heavy metal.

“I had never heard that style of playing,” said Tom Allan, who engineered Sabbath’s self-titled debut album in 1969.

“I couldn’t really fathom it. I didn’t really get it. You never heard anything like that on the radio.”

The record was grim and sludgy – partly because the band had recorded it in just two days, with limited funds.

Critics weren’t sure what to make of it. Writing in Rolling Stone, Lester Bangs said the album had been “hyped as a rockin’ ritual celebration of the Satanic mass or some such claptrap… They’re not that bad, but that’s about all the credit you can give them.”

The supposedly satanic imagery sparked a moral panic in the mainstream press, which intensified when it was discovered that the album’s title track contained a chord progression known as the Devil’s Interval, which had been banned by the church in the Middle Ages.

What the press didn’t realise was that Black Sabbath, the song, had been written as a warning of the dangers of satanism, after Ward had fallen asleep reading books on the occult and woken up to see a ghostly, hooded figure standing at the end of his bed.

“It frightened the pissing life out of me,” he later recalled.

Whatever the truth, the controversy sold records and attracted legions of fans.

Once, the band returned to their hotel to find 20 black-clad satanists holding candles and chanting outside their room. To get rid of them, Osbourne blew out the flames and sang Happy Birthday.

Still, Sabbath leaned into their reputation, writing darker material and gaining a reputation as hellraisers as the 70s wore on.

But the music was never as basic or one-note as their image suggested.

Their second album, Paranoid, marked a seismic leap in songcraft, from the visceral anti-war anthem War Pigs, to the creeping intensity of the title track, via the sci-fi horror of Iron Man, and the ghostly balladry of Planet Caravan.

They kept up the pace on 1971’s Master of Reality, with Osbourne describing Children Of The Grave as “the most kick-ass song we’d ever recorded”.

Vol 4, released in 1972, is sometimes overlooked because of its lack of a big radio single, but it also contains some of the band’s best and most varied work.

Snowblind documents their descent into drug abuse with a depth-charge guitar riff; while St Vitus’ Dance is a surprisingly tender piece of advice to a heartbroken friend, and Laguna Sunrise is a bucolic instrumental.

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, meanwhile, was written as a furious critique of a music industry that had written them off.

“The people who have crippled you / You want to see them burn.”

After 55 years, and hundreds of imitators, the revelatory shock of Sabbath’s sound has dimmed. How else do you explain Osbourne and Iommi performing Paranoid at Queen Elizabeth II’s Golden Jubilee in 2002?

But the power of those songs, from Iommi’s brainsplitting riffs to Osbourne’s insistent vocal wail, is indelible.

When he inducted Black Sabbath to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Lars Ulrich of Metallica said, “if there was no Black Sabbath, hard rock and heavy metal would be shaped very differently”.

“When it comes to defining a genre within the world of heavy music,” he said, “Sabbath stand alone.”

Writing after the band’s penultimate farewell show in 2017, Osbourne said he was humbled by the acclaim.

“I never dreamed we would be here 49 years later,” he said.

“But when I think about all of it, the best thing about being in Black Sabbath after all these years is that the music has held up.”

1) Paranoid

Written as a last-minute “filler” for Black Sabbath’s second album, the group accidentally created their biggest hit: The story of a man battling his inner voices, set to one of rock’s most powerful riffs.

“Every now and then you get a song from nowhere,” said Osbourne. “It’s a gift.”

2) Crazy Train

The song that launched Osbourne’s solo career, it’s almost atypically upbeat – shrugging off Cold War paranoia and declaring: “Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love.”

It’s only the maniacal laughter in the fading bars that suggests this outlook is the purview of a madman.

3) Sabbath Bloody Sabbath

Sabbath’s reputation for darkness means their melodic capabilities were often overlooked. But Osbourne was a passionate admirer of the Beatles, and you can hear their influence on the pastoral chorus of this song, before Tony Iommi powers in with a growling guitar line.

John Lennon would undoubtedly have approved of Osbourne’s seething critique of the music industry, summed up in the line: “Bog blast all of you.“

4) Changes

Sabbath revealed their soft underbelly on this 1972 piano ballad, written about a break-up that drummer Bill Ward was experiencing.

“I thought the song was brilliant from the moment we first recorded it,” said Osbourne, who later reworked it as a duet with his daughter, Kelly, and scored a UK number one the week before Christmas 2003.

5) Mr Crowley

Inspired by notorious occultist Aleister Crowley, this track from 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz allowed Osbourne to play up to his mock-satanic image.

But is also helped him escape from the shadow of Black Sabbath, with a swirling, heavy-psychedelic sound, capped off by a blistering solo from his new foil, guitar virtuoso Randy Rhoads.

Further listening: War Pigs and Iron Man are all-time classics; while Diary of a Madman and Suicide Solution are crucial chapters in Osbourne’s solo songbook. Also check out Patient Number 9, the title track of his final album, which ended his career on a high.