Black Sabbath’s first album is effectively ground zero for heavy metal - and as guitarist Tony Iommi recalled, it was an album made under intense pressure.
In 2013, Iommi told Classic Rock how Sabbath recorded the album with an incredibly tight deadline and with a vision to revolutionise rock music.
“The idea was to make an album heavier than anything that had ever been heard before,” he said. “We wanted to make something different.
“We had only bass, drums, guitar and vocals. We didn’t have keyboards or a rhythm guitarist. The idea was to make the sound as big as we could for what we’d got.
“We were relying on [producer] Rodger Bain, because we’d never done a record before. It was very different for us to go into a studio with a producer.
“We knew nothing about recording. All we knew in those days was how to play the songs, like we did at gigs.
“Because we only had a couple of days to do the whole album, it was hard for us because you only had one go at each song. There was no time to keep going over and over the songs. We had one try and that was it.
“I remember when we did Warning, it was quite a long track – when we used to do it on stage it was fifteen minutes – but when we recorded it we cocked it up a bit.
“I said, ‘Can we do it again?’ And Rodger said, ‘Well, okay you can have one more go at it.’ And that was it. We were like, Fucking hell! It was a bit nerve-wracking. In the end, Rodger edited it down a bit.”
The album, titled simply Black Sabbath, was released on 13 February 1970, and peaked at No.8 on the UK chart.
As Iommi remembered: “We loved the idea of having an album out, but we never knew for one minute what was going to happen with it, of course. It was just exciting to be able to do an album.
“We were coming back from a European tour when we heard that the album was in the top ten. Bloody hell! We were in shock.”
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