In regards to the production of the album itself, it was co-produced by guitarist Tony Iommi and Mike Butcher. Iommi wrote in his autobiography about the time: “We produced “Sabotage” ourselves. The band disappeared most of the time so it was sort of left to me and the engineer. I got more and more involved with the production side of things, but it wasn’t like I would sit there and tell the other guys what to do, because they knew what to play, they put their parts to it. I just spent a lot more time in the studio because, when it came to doing the guitar bits or mixing, it would take longer and I’d be more into it than they were. I didn’t mind so much. I’d be there to the death”.
In the book “The Story of Black Sabbath: Wheels of Confusion”, Iommi again reflected, "We could've continued and gone on and on, getting more technical, using orchestras and everything else, which we didn't particularly want to. We took a look at ourselves, and we wanted to do a rock album – “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” wasn't a rock album, really”. And while both Iommi and drummer Bill Ward appeared to enjoy the recording sessions for the album, Ozzy Osbourne was obviously growing frustrated with how long Black Sabbath albums were taking to record, as quoted in his autobiography, "Sabotage took about four thousand years”.
Under all of this stress and strain, the band managed to find a way to get the album together, and to release their sixth album, the aforementioned “Sabotage”.
From the opening bars of the opening track, you can tell something is going on here with Black Sabbath. Because although they have had dozens of great songs up to this point of their career when they recorded “Sabotage”, and they had had songs with attitude and heavy riffs and amazing stylistic bass riffs through them – nothing quite prepares you for the opening of “Hole in the Sky”. Yes, that opening riff is a beauty, great tones from Iommi once again, and Geezer’s bassline immediately bounds to the front of the mix to hammer home that initial heavy interaction. But my word Bill Ward is hitting those drums and cymbals BLOODY HARD! He has done some remarkable things on previous albums, but this is a John Bonham styled attack on his instrument early on. The brilliance of the ‘go your own way’ style of guitar and bass during the chorus is amazingly composed and played. How do you come up with those two different riffing's and yet make it sound so awesome? The tempo holds together throughout the track, and Ward’s drum skin and cymbals must have had to have been replaced following the recording of the song. Anyone who doubted the direction this album was heading in knows full well at the conclusion of the first song.
And yet, even after all of these years, I question the decision to insert the 49 seconds of “Don’t Start (Too Late)” between the opening track and the one that is listed at number three on Side A of the album. The instrumental interlude, in the context of what has come and what is to follow, just doesn’t make any sense. Sure, let’s listen to Tony twiddle away on his guitar in a quite interlude that is nothing more than an interruption to the magnificence that is coming forth out of the speakers. It is not the first time the band has offered us these little nooks between tracks. Some work OK though the albums would be better off without them. Here on “Sabotage”, “Don’t Start (Too Late)” actually does sabotage what should have been a great abrupt ending to the opening track that then hit straight into what should have been the follow up track. That song, is “Symptom of the Universe”. And if they had done that, this album may well have been untouchable.
I still get the same feeling listening to the start of “Symptom of the Universe” as I did when I first heard it, all those years ago. That opening riff from Tony is so simple and yet so incredible. From the outset, it is what you expect that heavy metal is. And then the bass and drums join in to drive the power even further. But come on – that rolling drum solo from Bill Ward that comes in... have you ever tried to play that the same way Bill does? I suspect Bill was never able to play it the same way twice when it came to recording it either, but when you listen carefully to it, it is so incredibly unobtainable it just makes this song unique. It almost sounds out of time, and yet he pulls it back at the right moment to kick back into that hard hitting 2/4 time where, like he did on the opening track, he is hitting those damn things so hard. The drumming on this song once again highlights how important Bill Ward was on these early Black Sabbath albums. And then Ozzy chimes in, in that higher than high tone that sadly disqualified him from singing it in later years when he couldn’t reach those heights. In his autobiography, Iommi has this to say: “Sabotage has a couple of unusual tracks, like ‘Symptom of the Universe’. That has been described as the first progressive metal song, and I won’t disagree with that. It starts with an acoustic bit, then it goes into the up-tempo stuff to give it that dynamic, and it does have a lot of changes to it, including the jam at the end. That last bit was made up in the studio. We did the track and after that finished, we just started jamming. I started playing this riff, the others joined in, we kept it going and we ended up keeping it. Then I overdubbed it with acoustic guitar. A few things we’ve recorded came from jams like that. We’d just keep going on the thing and so the end of the song sometimes became longer than the song itself”. This is one of the great songs, to me one of five that I would suggest a person unfamiliar with this era of Sabbath has to listen to if they want to know what the band was like.
(War Pigs, Children of the Grave, After Forever, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Symptom of the Universe)
And then, to complete side one of the album we have “Megalomania”, perhaps and underrated song or a slightly forgotten song of this era of Sabbath. It doesn’t often get brought up in conversation, it rarely appears in best-of compilations, and it is a mystery as to why this occurs. The sprawling almost-ten minute journey is the true beginning of the journey to progressive metal. The 3 minute slow burn to open the track, with Ozzy’s sinister vocals along with piano and synth adding in underneath, then bursts forth with Iommi’s great riff and Ozzy’s vocals shattering into the highest echelons of his range, chanting and pontificating as the song grows into the powerful beast it becomes, with Geezer’s bass riffing under the chorus running up and down the fretboard, and Tony’s solo offering as surprising as it is brilliant. It is a wonderful track which really does showcase Ozzy’s vocals at their best. Iommi's final thoughts on the song in his autobiography were: “A lot of our songs tended to be long anyway. Like ‘Megalomania’: we carried on and on with that until we just faded it out. Some of those tracks were probably twice as long as you hear on the album, but we had to fade them out”.
Side 2 opens with “The Thrill of it All”, and Geezer lyrics are really throwing curveballs during this track. “Inclination of direction, walk the turned and twisted drift,
with the children of creation, futuristic dreams we sift
Clutching violently we whisper with a liquefying cry
Any identify the answers that are surely doomed to die”
One of the things that has always struck me about some of Ozzy’s vocals in this song is that they have a real Lennon/McCartney vibe about them, especially in the ‘oh yeah... OH YEAH!” part of the song. Ozzy has always professed to have loved The Beatles and while it was unlikely to be his intention that familiarity always strikes me here. This is followed by the mostly instrumental track “Supertzar”, that has the backing of an English choir to create the atmosphere that the band was looking for. Iommi commented in his autobiography: “I wrote ‘Supertzar’ at home with a Mellotron, to create choir sounds. I put heavy guitar to that and it really blended well. I thought, I’d love to try this in the studio, it would be great if we could use a real choir”.
The album’s only single release was “Am I Going Insane (Radio)”, probably the only track here that had any chance of getting airplay given the wonderful heaviness of the rest of the collected tracks. It’s a simple song with some synth thrown in that may help it sound a bit more commercial from what has come before it on the album. There is no outstanding drum fills of bass line, and Tony’s guitar for the most part is quite muted. Reportedly Ozzy was disappointed with both of these songs, and there is a certain amount of truth to the fact that they are completely different to the rest of the songs on the album.
The album concludes with “The Writ”, one of only a handful of Black Sabbath songs to feature lyrics composed by Ozzy, who typically relied on Geezer for lyrics. As will be obvious to those that knew of what was happening around the band at the time, the song was inspired by the frustrations Ozzy felt at the time over their court problems with their former manager. Ozzy noted in his autobiography: "I wrote most of the lyrics myself, which felt a bit like seeing a shrink. All the anger I felt towards Meehan came pouring out”. Thematically, "The Writ" and "Megalomania" are intertwined, according to Bill Ward, as they both deal with the same tensions arising from these ongoing legal troubles. “The Writ” is long tome venting the bands feelings about how their ordeal had been affecting them during this whole time, and interesting change from topics that the band had usually focused on in their songwriting. It is an openly sore wound that finishes off this album in the style that you would hope for an album that deserves its status as one of the band’s best.
For anyone who has not already done so, the podcast titled And Volume for All, hosted by the outrageously talented Quinn, did several episodes on the original iteration of Black Sabbath in season one of said podcast back at the end of 2022, including talking about the album “Sabotage”. I highly recommend that you listen to those if you love amazing podcasts and especially on heavy metal. It is the best music podcast on the planet, and if you aren’t listening, then start now. You can thank me later.
I actually came to Black Sabbath AFTER I had first discovered both Ozzy Osbourne and Dio, and worked my way backwards through the Dio helmed albums “Heaven and Hell” and “Mob Rules”. It wasn’t a deliberate thing, just all a part of my own journey in discovering heavy metal music, which if you are interested, I outline on bonus Patreon only episodes available on that platform. You can find the link in the show notes.
On that journey, “Sabotage” arrived. I don’t really remember in what order I originally heard the eight albums of the band's original formation, but they were all within several months of each other. And as most of you listening to this album would know, there is a wonderful mixture and changes of style and substance about the songs on each album. The way that this foursome continued to try and change the wheel as they moved from album to album, adding and subtracting to the pieces they composed, is what made them the innovators they were during the 1970’s. They weren’t afraid of composing in jam sessions and changing course within a song or a slew of songs. And that is no different here on “Sabotage”. You can feel the aggression that comes on songs such as “Hole in the Sky” and “Symptom of the Universe” and “The Writ”. You can sense the desire to try new things on songs such as “Supertzar”, and the freeforming way they came up with ideas such as on “Megalomania”. In what must have been the most difficult circumstances to try and get in a headspace to write and record an album with everything swirling around them – they came up with this album. The first side of the album in particular for me is immense, amazing, incredible. Those songs – ignoring the 49 seconds between the opening tracks – contains everything wonderful about this band, and for me certainly some of Bill Ward’s finest work.
I have had the album out for the past couple of weeks – indeed, as we have just seen a few weeks ago the final concert appearance of the original Black Sabbath, I have had all eight of those original albums out over the course of the past few weeks again. And they are all amazing. But listening more closely to “Sabotage” because of this podcast episode, it again has struck me just what an amazing album this is.
Changes of substance came over the next two releases, ones that sometimes create conversations over their content, and it remains obvious that tensions created over the issues that were faced here eventually contributed to the parting of this foursome. But on this particular album, everything was running at full steam, and creating some of their best material of all.
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