Black Sabbath’s Paranoid was an album of happy accidents and happenstance. It wasn’t even meant to be called Paranoid. Until the record label intervened, Sabbath were going to all it War Pigs – and even then War Pigs was a compromise.
Guitarist Tony Iommi had intended War Pigs to be titled Walpurgis, to mark the ‘Satanic Christmas.’ That was a little too satanic for Vertigo’s tastes. But then what did they expect from the band who had invented heavy metal just a few months earlier, its eponymous title-track warning of “Satan coming round the bend…”?
Well, history tells us that Black Sabbath relented, and looking back they can have few regrets. Walpurgis would have been a cool title, for the song, for the album – plenty of metal bands have taken up the name in the years since. But Paranoid – that is, as they say, the song that made them famous.
Speaking to Total Guitar in 2010, a conversation you can read in full on MusicRadar, Iommi admitted that he was caught off-guard by its runaway success. Here they were getting all musically adventurous, expanding their sound, heaving doom metal into existence with Electric Funeral, exploring the terror of the wide-open spaces with War Pigs, and the spaced-out stoner jam Planet Caravan, and this three-minute throw-and-go rocker was getting all the attention.
“We really didn’t want a hit single with Paranoid because in them days, to have a hit single was selling out,” said Iommi. “We didn't want a hit single and we didn’t expect it to be a single. We just did it as a filler track.”
Again, this was at the behest of Vertigo, whose interference was most unwelcome but, arguably, justified by the success of Paranoid, both the song and the album.
“We were recording the album and the label suddenly said, ‘You don’t have enough songs!’” recalled Iommi. “We didn’t know what to do and they asked us to come up with another song. Within a few minutes I came up with the riff to Paranoid, played it to the other guys and they liked it, so off we went. That’s how simple Paranoid was – we wrote and recorded it in a day.”
This was 1970, an analogue era. There was no Voice Memos app on your phone. There were no laptops for recording. Sabbath didn’t have anything to record on as they played. But maybe these limitations played their part in making the Iommi metal’s riffmaster general. “In those days, you didn’t have tape recorders,” he said. “You had to play riffs, keep playing them and remember them.”
It helps when the riff is memorable. Paranoid had that. In that sense, it fit into what Sabbath were doing. This is an album packed with riffs. It is for many – MusicRadar’s guitars editor included – the definitive heavy metal album. It also was the most radio-friendly song they had.
“Most of the tracks on the album were quite long and a lot of people probably wouldn’t have played them because they were too long,” said Iommi. “Paranoid was an ideal track to release, being short and up-tempo. It just took off.
“We were as shocked as anybody when that got in the charts. We thought, ‘Bloody hell, there’s all this stuff here we’re trying to do musically and then something as simple as Paranoid gets in the charts and everybody remembers it!”
Paranoid wasn’t the only song to just come straight off the practice room floor. Planet Caravan came together with Iommi getting in touch with his jazz-prog side and going for it.
It was the album’s sleeper hit, presenting this other side of Sabbath, a work of psychedelia for the acid trippers and the perma-stoned. Ozzy Osbourne put his vocals through a Leslie rotating speaker unit. Planet Caravan played well to those who had gone to see 2001: A Space Odyssey two years earlier and leaned into the tagline, ‘The Ultimate Trip.’
“Planet Caravan was about playing something different,” said Iommi. “It was one of those songs that, when we were in the rehearsal room, I just start playing it and thought, ‘this is nice.’ I never thought that it might be too far ‘on the other side’ for Sabbath to do. If we liked something that was a bit different, we just played it. That attitude gave me an opportunity to play a couple of jazzy things that weren’t planned.”
And back then, Sabbath never overworked it. Like their eponymous debut LP, Paranoid was recorded in days, not weeks. Rodger Bain puts mics in the right places and hit record. For Planet Caravan, Bill Ward stepped out from behind the kit to play congas. They were on a tight schedule but they sure sound relaxed on this one, as though something heady was being passed around in the studio. Iommi was just glad of the chance to stretch out a little and platy.
“I do like the blues and jazzy stuff, which you can hear on Planet Caravan,” he said. “I think any guitar player likes to play that sort of stuff, and I suppose the blues and jazz have influenced my playing more than most, so I try to get some of those flavoured licks in without even thinking about it.”
Tony Iommi’s first solo album in more than 20 years, From The Dark, is out now via BMG. Iommi recently discussed what drives him on at the age of 78 and admitted, “I carry on wondering when I’m gonna keel over”.
