Paranoid – Blood and Porridge

July 29, 2025July 29, 2025

Return to Ozz

From youtube.com / © BBC

My previous post was about the much-loved Ozzy Osbourne, singer with groundbreaking heavy metal band Black Sabbath in the 1970s, and an ultra-successful solo artist from the 1980s onwards, who died on July 22nd. Here are my favourite dozen songs featuring Ozzy’s vocals.

Black Sabbath (from 1970’s Black Sabbath)

The eponymous first song on Black Sabbath’s eponymous first album, this sets the tone for everything to follow. It immediately establishes a horror-movie vibe, opening with rumbling thunder, sluicing rain and clanging altar bells. Then the doomy chug of heavy guitars and the sepulchral wails of Ozzy’s voice kick in: “What is this that stands before me? Figure in black which points at me-e-ee?” Things eventually speed up for a tumultuous but still menacing climax. (Unsurprisingly, guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler were horror movie fans and their band’s name comes from a scary film, 1963’s Black Sabbath, directed by the legendary Mario Bava and starring the equally legendary Boris Karloff.)

Incidentally, I like how Ice T uses Black Sabbath for his 1989 track Shut Up, Be Happy. He retains the song’s ominous music but replaces Ozzy’s vocals with the voice of Jello Biafra from the Dead Kennedys, intoning about how America has just been put under martial law: “All constitutional rights have been suspended. Stay in your homes. Do not attempt to contact loved ones, insurance agents or attorneys. Shut up!” Depressingly, Shut Up, Be Happy is more relevant than ever in 2025.

Meanwhile, for a proper cover version of Black Sabbath, I’d recommend the one by goth-metal band Type O Negative on 1994’s Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath, a collection of Sabbath covers whose other contributors include White Zombie, Therapy?, Corrosion of Conformity and Faith No More. It’s not the most the adventurous of covers, but the late Peter Steele’s vocals are suitably foreboding.

© Vertigo / Warner Bros.

Iron Man (from 1970’s Paranoid)

Much loved by Beavis and Butthead, this is the most remorseless and skull-crushing of Sabbath songs. It’s about a man who travels into the future, witnesses the apocalypse, gets turned to steel, then returns to the present to warn humanity but is ridiculed and shunned because he’s now a metallic freak: “Is he alive or dead? Has he thoughts within his head? We’ll just pass him there… Why should we even care?” So, what does he do? He engineers the apocalypse he foresaw: “Heavy boots of lead, fills his victims full of dread…”

I’ll make a confession here. Back in my drunken-asshole student days, I arrived home from the pub one Saturday night and, with one of my flatmates, also a drunken-asshole student, we made a bet while we played the album Paranoid on the flat’s stereo. If we played it at full volume, during which song would another flatmate, a clean-living, go-to-bed-early type, finally lose it, jump out of bed, fling open the door of his room and scream at us to turn it down? You guessed it. While Ozzy was hollering about Iron Man being turned to steel in the great magnetic field, the door of that flatmate’s room swung back and a voice bellowed: “WOULD YOU TURN THAT DREADFUL RACKET DOWN?”

War Pigs (from Paranoid)

A lamentation against war and those who orchestrate it, War Pigs is a reminder that Black Sabbath’s members were youths during the late 1960s when the pacifistic hippy movement was on the go. This being Sabbath, though, War Pigs dwells bitterly on war’s violence and hatred rather than try to counter it with calls for peace and love. It’s a long song, just under eight minutes, yet short on lyrics – the word-count is less than 150. But oh, what words: “Generals gathered in their masses, just like witches at black masses… In the fields, the bodies burning, as the war machine keeps turning…”

This song has seen several notable cover versions. Judas Priest did an impeccably metallic rendition of it – I also like the accompanying video, wherein Priest-frontman Rob Halford stomps about the stage like a farmer in wellies trying to negotiate a boggy field. A funked-up version of it impressively closes the 2023 album On Top of the Covers from singer / rapper T-Pain. But for a reworking of War Pigs that’s splendidly ‘out there’, yet retains the original’s drive and power, you can’t beat what the ‘Ethiopian Crunch Music’ band Ukandanz did to it. They replaced Tony Iommi’s guitar with a saxophone and sang it in Amharic.

© Vertigo / Warner Bros.

Planet Caravan (from Paranoid)

The sublimely dreamy and trippy Planet Caravan has been described as ‘the ultimate coming-down song’. Well, if the stories about how Ozzy and the rest of Black Sabbath were behaving at the time are true, they certainly needed a good coming-down song. To augment the faraway sound, Ozzy sang through a Leslie speaker during the recording, which gave the impression he was warbling the lyrics underwater.

There’s a mellow cover of Planet Caravan at the end of Pantera’s less-than-mellow 1994 album Far Beyond Driven. Indeed, Pantera performed Planet Caravan at the Back to the Beginning concert, Ozzy’s farewell show staged in Birmingham just two-and-a-half weeks before he died.

Children of the Grave (from Master of Reality)

Master of Reality is possibly Black Sabbath’s heaviest and doomiest-sounding album. Its best track, Children of the Grave, has an urgent, unsettling sound that suggests creepy, occult-flavoured goings-on. That feeling is increased by the song’s horror-movie-like title and the way it’s whispered sinisterly during the coda. But if you listen properly to the lyrics, you discover it’s not about the supernatural at all. It’s really another anti-war song, like War Pigs: “Must the world live in the shadow of atomic fear? Can they win the fight for peace, or will they disappear?”

Supernaut (from 1972’s Vol. 4)

The exuberant Supernaut might be, as the lyrics suggest, about a man trying to find “the dish that ran away with the spoon” or “the crossing near the golden rainbow’s end”. Or it might be about, you know, substances. Of which, by then, the band were taking a lot.

For a cracking (and funny) cover version of this song, look no further than the one by 1000 Homo DJs (actually a side-project of the industrial rock band Ministry) which retains the original’s insane jauntiness while spicing it up with a solemn 1960s voice intoning about the dangers of taking acid. For my money, this is the best track on Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath, basically because it’s not afraid to try something different.

© Vertigo

Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (from 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath)

What can I say? This is my all-time favourite Black Sabbath song – ever, ever, ever.

Symptom of the Universe (from 1974’s Sabotage)

It could be argued that the hectic, exhilarating Symptom of the Universe is a track that helped invent punk rock. And if it didn’t, it surely helped invent thrash metal. Fittingly, the Brazilian thrash metallers Sepultura do a nifty version of this song, which again can be found on Nativity in Black: A Tribute to Black Sabbath.

Never Say Die (from 1978’s Never Say Die)

By 1978 the writing was on the wall for Ozzy Osbourne’s association with Black Sabbath. He’d already quit the band briefly (and been replaced, equally briefly, by singer Dave Walker) and Never Say Die would be the final Ozzy-fronted Black Sabbath album until 2013’s 13. Thus, it was recorded under strained circumstances. Never Say Die was badly received at the time, and nowadays it’s fashionable to write it off as Ozzy-era Sabbath’s last, perfunctory gasp. But, if you can handle the ‘jazz inflections’, it’s not a bad album – just different. As the Guardian once said of it, “it’s a quirky and enjoyable record, as long as you don’t expect Sabbath Even Bloodier Sabbath.”

And the title track is a stormer. Ozzy delivers it so directly and defiantly he could be fronting a garage band.

Crazy Train (from 1980’s Blizzard of Ozz)

The second track off Ozzy’s first solo album, this has a cleaner, nimbler guitar sound – courtesy of tragically short-lived guitarist Randy Rhoads – that’s in keeping with the mainstream American glam-metal aesthetic that, for a while, dominated heavy metal in the 1980s. The lyrics begin wholesomely – “Maybe it’s not too late to learn how to love and forget how to hate” – but by the chorus we’re getting a probable summation of Ozzy’s mental state at the time: “Mental wounds not healing, life’s a bitter shame, I’m going off the rails on a crazy train!” (It wasn’t until 1982 that he’d marry the formidable Sharon Arden, the woman who’d, eventually, clean him up, sort him out and reinvent him as an amiable, reality-TV dad.)

© Jet Records

That same year, the now Ozzy-less Black Sabbath released Heaven and Hell, their first album with Ronnie James Dio on vocals. 1980 was also when I entered the ‘senior school’ – fifth and sixth year – at my high school. One of the perks of this was that the senior pupils had their own common room in the school basement, with a record player and loudspeakers. For a few, ear-bleeding months, Blizzard of Ozz and Heaven and Hell were never off that record player.

Mr Crowley (from Blizzard of Ozz)

I don’t think Ozzy had acquired the moniker the ‘Prince of Darkness’ yet. However, aware that darkness was part of his schtick, he included this song on Blizzard of Ozz – a paeon to the English occultist Aleister Crowley. Depending on your point of view, Crowley was truly the Wickedest Man Alive or was a piss-taking libertine who enjoyed terrorising genteel, respectable British society with exaggerated tales of his diabolism. The song is launched in melodramatic fashion by the organ-tones of keyboardist Don Airey, but Ozzy sings it with agreeable wistfulness: “Your lifestyle to me seemed so tragic with the thrill of it all. You fooled all the people with magic. Yeah, you waited on Satan’s call…”

For a really over-the-top version of Mr Crowley, check out this effort by Cradle of Filth.

Thereafter, Ozzy would put out a dozen more solo albums. The best that can be said about them is that they’re variable in quality. But their highlights are certainly better than anything on the seven albums Black Sabbath released during the same period that had neither Ozzy nor Ronnie James Dio singing on them.

And obviously… Paranoid (from Paranoid)

Yes, I’m glad this was what Ozzy sang at the very end of his farewell concert earlier this month. There was no better way to bow out.

© Vertigo

August 29, 2022September 2, 2022

Honour the Sabbath

I’m no fan of lengthy international sporting competitions – apart from the Rugby and Football World Cups – and I reacted with a weary shrug to the recent holding of the Commonwealth Games in the English Midlands city of Birmingham. However, I’d have willingly sat through the Games’ twelve days of sporting endeavour, bored out of my wits, just to be present at the occasion’s closing ceremony. For this offered a few minutes that, in my mind, were the musical highlight of August 2022, if not the year 2022. I’m talking about the sight of former Black Sabbath singer and famous Birmingham son Ozzy Osbourne coming up through a stage-trapdoor into a shroud of blood-red mist to sing the 1970 Sabbath classic Paranoid, with Ozzy’s old Sabbath comrade Tony Iommi thumping away on electric guitar.

Apparently, Ozzy had originally turned down an invitation to sing at the ceremony due to health issues. Quite a lot of health issues, in fact – Parkinson’s disease, neck and spine surgery, depression, blood clots, nerve pain. But at the last minute, deciding the show must go on, he jumped on a flight from Los Angeles and made a surprise appearance in his old home city. And though I was no fan of the sporting stuff, I was delighted to see him perform at this, the biggest event in Birmingham for years. Long before anyone had heard of Peaky Blinders (2013-22), Ozzy – catchphrase: “Oi’m the Prince o’ Dawkness!” – had made it cool to be a Brum.

Anyway, this has inspired me to dust down and repost the following item. It was written in 2017, just after those mighty metallers Black Sabbath had played their last-ever gig.

The third commandment tells us to keep the Sabbath holy. Well, I believe in honouring the Sabbath but I’m not talking about the seventh day of the week. I’m talking about Black Sabbath, the 49-year-old heavy metal band who played their last-ever gig two nights ago.

Fittingly, Black Sabbath’s farewell performance took place at the Genting Arena in Birmingham, the city where it all started for them. Guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward and incomparable – many would say incorrigible – singer Ozzy Osbourne grew up in Aston, one of Birmingham’s working-class suburbs. Prior to forming the band, they did a variety of unglamorous jobs there, including delivering coal, labouring on building sites and working in a sheet metal factory, car plant and abattoir. Iommi ended his time in the steelworks with an accident that sheared off two of his fingertips and nearly ruined his budding career as a guitarist. Osbourne, meanwhile, took up housebreaking and got jailed for six weeks.

Butler told the BBC recently, “It wasn’t a great place to be at that time. We were listening to songs about San Francisco. The hippies were all peace and love and everything. There we were in Aston. Ozzy was in prison from burgling houses, me and Tony were always in fights with somebody… we had quite a rough upbringing. Our music reflected the way we felt.”

If they felt miserable in Aston and channelled that misery into their music, I can only say the misery was worth it. The first, eponymously-named song on their first, eponymously-named album in 1970 sets the tone for Black Sabbath’s career of evil. It’s a gloriously dark and doom-laden affair, opening with rumbles of thunder, the sluicing of heavy rain and the clanging of altar bells. These give way to a funereal chug of heavy guitars and the eerie high-pitched squalls of Ozzy’s voice (“What is this that stands before me? / Figure in black which points at me-e-ee?”), which later speed up for a tumultuous but still ominous climax. I imagine that if any of those peace-and-love hippies whom Butler referred to had gone to a Sabbath gig in 1970 (having ingested some psychedelic substances beforehand) and the gig had opened with this number, they’d have probably fled from the venue screaming in terror with their hands clamped over their ears.

Iommi and Butler were horror-movie fans and their music had a horror-movie vibe. Even the band’s name came from a scary film, 1963’s Black Sabbath, directed by the legendary Mario Bava and starring the legendary Boris Karloff. Also horror-movie-esque is the cover of the first Sabbath album, showing a black-robed lady looming spectrally in the middle of a spooky autumnal landscape – the building in the background is actually Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire. I find it cool that nobody knows the identity of the woman, presumably a briefly-hired model or actress, who posed for the picture. Iommi has claimed that, later, she turned up at one Sabbath concert and said hello to the band. But I like to think she’d never been at the original photo-shoot at all. Rather, she was a ghost that haunted the watermill – and when they developed the cover-photo, her wraithlike image had somehow imposed itself on it.

Black Sabbath produced another album in 1970, Paranoid, which was choc-a-bloc with groovily heavy tunes – the famous title track, the skull-crushing Iron Man, the nihilistic War Pigs and the sublimely dreamy and trippy Planet Caravan, which has been described as ‘the ultimate coming-down song’. The following year’s Master of Reality gave us the jaunty but provocative After Forever (“Would you like to see the Pope on the end of a rope / Do you think he’s a fool?”) and the apocalyptic Children of the Grave. Other classic songs included Supernaut, which turned up on the 1972 album Vol. 4; the exhilarating title track of 1973’s Sabbath Bloody Sabbath that’s perhaps my favourite Sabbath song ever; and the similarly exhilarating Symptom of the Universe on 1974’s Sabotage, which suggests (to me, anyway) Sabbath were secret forbearers of punk rock. 1976’s Technical Ecstasy and 1978’s Never Say Die are less acclaimed and lack a truly killer track, but I’m still partial to them both.

In 1980 we got Heaven and Hell which – shock! horror! – didn’t have Ozzy Osbourne doing vocals. The singer had been sacked from the band due to his massive substance abuse and consequent massive unreliability. While Ozzy maintains that he was no worse a wreck than the other three band-members were at the time, it was surely tough working with a man prone to such misfortunes as snorting a line of ants he’d mistaken for a line of cocaine or being caught by the San Antonio police urinating over the Alamo whilst dressed in a frock. Making a Black Sabbath album without Ozzy sounds as feasible as filming The Lord of the Rings without Gandalf, but Iommi, Butler and Ward wisely recruited the late, great Ronnie James Dio as a replacement. Dio gave Black Sabbath a new lease of life. He made them sound different – his operatic voice a contrast to the wailing alienness of Ozzy’s – but I have no complaints about the resulting album, full of spiffing tracks like Children of the Sea, Neon Knights and Die Young.

Dio sang on the next album for Black Sabbath, 1981’s Mob Rules, and returned to sing on 1992’s Dehumanizer; but they were the only Sabbath albums for a long time that were any good. During the 1980s and 1990s Iommi was the sole founding member who stuck with the band and a succession of jobbing musicians contributed to the records. Singers included Ian Gillan and Glenn Hughes, two alumni of Sabbath’s more mainstream 1970s rivals Deep Purple. Meanwhile, the band seemed to get through drummers at a rate worthy of Spinal Tap, with the ELO’s Bev Bevan, the Clash’s Terry Chimes and the ubiquitous Cozy Powell banging the skins at various times. To be honest, the band’s output during this period – 1983’s Born Again, 1986’s Seventh Star, 1987’s The Eternal Idol, 1989’s Headless Cross, 1990’s Tyr, 1994’s Cross Purposes, 1995’s Forbidden – is pretty rubbish.

Happily, the original line-up had reconciled by the late 1990s and they’ve played together sporadically since then, at least when other work commitments (like Ozzy’s solo career), illness (Iommi was diagnosed as having lymphoma in 2012) and plain old quarrelling (Bill Ward fell out with everyone else and quit in 2012) didn’t get in the way. In 2013 they even managed to produce a new album, 13, which while not quite up to their old standards got some positive reviews and produced a decent single, God is Dead? Filling in for Ward on the drums was Brad Wilk from Rage Against the Machine. I imagine for Wilk getting this job must have been a dream come true.

Well, it seems they’ve finally called it a day. Maybe that’s just as well in Ozzy’s case, since the old boy’s 67 now and surely needs to take it easy after a lifetime of drugs, alcohol, excess and idiocy. (At Christmas, after the news that George Michael and Status Quo’s Rick Parfitt had died within the space of 24 hours, a friend said to me worriedly, “At this rate Ozzy’s not going to make it to the Bells.”)

They deserve to enjoy their retirement for their legacy is huge. Their weighty fingerprints are all over musical movements like grunge and hardcore punk. And they’re clearly major influences on such metallic sub-genres as black metal, doom metal, goth metal, power metal, sludge metal, speed metal and stoner metal. Indeed, they’re responsible for more metal than the Brummie steelworks where the young Tony Iommi lost his fingertips and almost lost his future in music.