Iona’s Song of the Week - No. 06 (2025 Part 2)

1968 is notable for being my 10th year on this mighty fine earth, and it was also the year that a quartet rose from the grit and grime that was Birmingham at the end of the sixties! Given recent events, you will probably have guessed to whom I am referring! Yes, that quintessential heavy rock band Black Sabbath! Looking back, I am somewhat shocked to discover that on my first listening to their first two LPs, both released in 1970, as I sat in the bedroom I shared with my older brother as the platters turned on our Dansette record player about 100 yards from the Indian Ocean in Dar-es-Salaam, that I was listening to music ‘hot off the presses’! Given that we lived some 800 + miles south of Birmingham, I have always thought it would have been years after their initial release. But hell no, we had been lent the two albums by Tina, the wife of one of our dad’s pals, Bruce, who had just obtained them herself!

I was always going to get around to Black Sabbath; however, the death of the lead singer, the formidable Ozzy Osbourne, who passed on 22nd July this year, has brought them up from my musical depths. I have only really listened to the first Eponomous LP and the second Paranoid, which has an evergreen title track. As fate would have it, my heavy rock needs seemed better suited by that other stonkin' English outfit Deep Purple, who formed in London the same year I turned 10! It was probably the fact that, as an embryonic teenager, heavy rock was a tad too much in the late sixties and Deep Purple’s first two LPs, Shades of Deep Purple and The Book Of Taliesyn, were more my ‘cup-of-tea’ offending my quasi-Christian sensibilities a lot less! Deep Purple covered Neil Diamond, The Beatles and Ike and Tina Turner for goodness' sake!

And so, our SotW is the second track from that second album Paranoid, and unusual for me, it is the second shortest song on the set list!

https://youtu.be/0qanF-91aJo?feature=shared

As a sub-note, my brother’s oldest son got into Sabbath at about the same age I did and was there at their final gig on the 5th July in Villa Park, the home of his football team! And finally, the somewhat satanic imagery has always put me off although I am led to believe that Ozzy and other band members were/are Christian! In fact, Tony Iommi is wearing a ‘christian’ cross in this video! What’s that old saying? Ah yes, “the Devil has the best music”!