In 1970, Black Sabbath’s first album kicked off with a song that would become known as one of the creepiest in rock history.
Written by Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, the self-titled intro song shared space on the A-side of a four-track single and immediately made Sabbath’s doom-and-gloom musical style crystal clear.
Ultimate Classic Rock ranked “Black Sabbath” No. 2 on its list of “The Creepiest Rock Songs” of all time, noting that the band “knew how to make one hell of an entrance” with the ominous opener that featured the sounds of a thunderstorm, church bells and eerie lyrics about impending doom.
“The first song on their first album starts with the sounds of an incoming storm and ominous bells ringing in the distance,” the outlet shared. “For the next six minutes, the band crawls through a thick, muddy mire as Ozzy Osbourne howls words penned by bassist Geezer Butler about a ghostly figure he claimed he saw standing at the foot of his bed after reading a book on the occult. The music, inspired by classical pieces interspersed with ‘Satanic’ harmonic progressions, fits the lyrics’ dark mood and still sends shivers up the spine.”
The chilling song got its name from a 1963 Boris Karloff movie, and then the band, which had previously been playing bluesier music under the name Earth, took the name as their moniker as well.
“The song came first,” Ward told Metal Hammer in an interview. “It was doomy, dark and very influenced by the supernatural. But what it didn’t have was a title. So, one day Geezer suggested we call it Black Sabbath, after a horror movie of the time.”
The film, subtitled “The Three Faces of Fear,” features three separate horror tales introduced by Karloff.
“Black Sabbath” was created as the band tried to find a way to stand out in the changing musical landscape during the late 1960s. Osbourne once said he found inspiration from a horror cinema that was near the band’s rehearsal space in England.
“One day I thought that it seemed strange that a lot of people spend so much money to see scary movies,” he told NY Rock in 2002, per Louder. “Nobody really wanted to listen to us, so we decided to play slightly scary music. We liked it and, yeah, that’s how it all got started. That’s the story of Black Sabbath.”
The song itself came after Geezer Butler saw a ghostly vision at the foot of his bed after looking at a 16th-century occult book Osbourne had given him.
“I was getting interested in black magic, and then I saw an apparition, whether I dreamt it or not,” Butler told Rock Cellar magazine in an interview. “This shape just appeared to me one night and scared the hell out of me. I wrote the lyrics for ‘Black Sabbath’ warning against getting involved with Satanism and stuff like that.”
Related: The Song That ‘Invented’ Heavy Metal Just Turned 56—And It Has a Nightmare of a Story
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