100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 War Pigs

02 Paranoid

03 Planet Caravan

04 Iron Man

05 Electric Funeral

06 Hand of Doom

07 Rat Salad

08 Fairies Wear Boots

The most influential album in the history of heavy metal – whole decades of Marshall stack usage stem from these eight songs – was created by four working class lads from Birmingham in England with zero pretensions. They didn’t want to change the world, but they were awfully keen on beer. That’s how it should be, of course. Heavy metal is the most democratic of music genres; the one where the distance between the audience and the artists is essentially one of stage height, and Paranoid is a record where listeners hear their basic existential fears amplified so that they sound like the end of the world. This is the most exciting downer in the history of rock & roll.

The four-piece Sabbath – vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist and main lyricist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward – had only been together for little more than two years when they cut their second album Paranoid (and even that time-frame included Iommi briefly doing a runner to Jethro Tull and quickly coming back disillusioned). On January 1970’s self-titled debut there were still notable vestiges of their blues rock background, but this follow-up, quickly recorded to take advantage of their growing profile, put an end to that later in the year. The record is a deathblow to ’60s sunshine and hippie optimism, introducing the new heaviness.

‘Finished with my woman ’cause she couldn’t help me with my mind,’ Osbourne declares on the title track, and the song sums up a worldview where destruction – whether from nuclear war or chemical obliteration – appears the only likely outcome. ‘Think I’ll lose my mind if I don’t find something to pacify,’ he adds, and the oblique reference to the Vietnam War (where one of the US Army’s strategies was ‘pacification’) is used not to signify protest but to acknowledge a personal malaise. The vengeful creature at the centre of ‘Iron Man’ – ‘Nobody wants him/They just turn their heads’ – is adolescent alienation writ large.

Black Sabbath didn’t talk down to their audience, and they made this journey into a suburban heart of darkness palatable with some of the most distinctive and distinctly famous riffs ever to be coaxed from an electric guitar. Iommi would later admit he was at a loss to explain where he plucked them from, but song after song on this album breaks new ground for the six-string. The electrifying central motif of ‘Paranoid’ was conceived last-minute as the basis for a filler piece, while the churning, discombobulated riff that underpins ‘Electric Funeral’ (offset by a burst of bluesy boogie in the middle) takes psychedelia to new extremes, and ‘Planet Caravan’ ventures into a desert soundscape.

But Iommi could be as fluid as he was crushing and on the opening ‘War Pigs’, where the wagers of the Vietnam War are memorably compared to witches, the band stretches out over eight minutes, alternately brutal and moving. At the opening, as sirens wail, Butler sounds like he’s using a brick for a plectrum, but the arrangement is perfectly balanced, taking in drum cracks, doom-laden feedback and clusters of electric punctuation that dazzle by way of contrast. The song is a pocket symphony; an Old Testament that successors will always look to.

Subtleties aside, Black Sabbath tended to the monolithic, but it was hardly a stretch. Ozzy’s horizon-reaching yowl was made for songs like ‘Hand of Doom’, where the rhythm virtually demands that head banging be invented. The group’s golden age wouldn’t last for long – when lines replaced pints they lost their balance – but Paranoid lives on, with all the magnificent fury of heavy metal but none of the questionable accoutrements.