Black Sabbath confronted the stark downsides of having too much of a good thing as the heavy metal pioneers came off their world tour in 1973. The entire experience (and the copious amount of drugs that accompanied it) drained the musicians physically, mentally, and emotionally, drying them out of any worthwhile ideas for their Vol. 4 follow-up and fifth album. The combination of writer’s block and drug comedowns incapacitated the band. They thought they might’ve reached the end.
In a last-ditch effort to replenish their creative juices, the band opted to rent out Clearwell Castle in Gloucestershire, England, to write their next album. The medieval estate was said to be haunted, as most creepy old buildings are wont to do. For a band like Black Sabbath, the sinister surroundings were perfect. There, in the depths of the Clearwell Castle dungeons, was where Black Sabbath’s fifth album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, came to be.
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But not before the band endured a few scares of their own design.
The Moment That Black Sabbath’s Writer’s Block Lifted
Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi was worse for wear after the band’s world tour in 1973. With no riffs to which Ozzy Osbourne could write lyrics, the band was at risk of stagnating. Iommi had always been a wellspring of musical ideas, which made this sudden bout of writer’s block more alarming. “For the first time ever, Tony seemed to be having a hard time coming up with new material,” Osbourne wrote in his autobiography, I Am Ozzy. “Which meant no riffs. And without riffs, we had no songs.”
“It was that Dutch band, Golden Earring, that saved us in the end,” Osbourne continued. “We were listening to their latest album, ‘Moontan’, and something just clicked in Tony’s head. A couple of days later, he came down to the dungeon and started playing the riff to ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’. Every time we thought Tony couldn’t do it again, he did it again and better. From that moment on, there was no more writer’s block. Which was a huge relief.”
In addition to the title track, “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”, the band wrote iconic tracks like “A National Acrobat” and “Killing Yourself to Live” from the Clearwell Castle grounds. The album peaked at No. 4 in the U.K., No. 5 in Australia, and No. 11 on the U.S. Billboard 200. Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 follow-up might not have been a chart-topper. But it was the affirmation they needed that their end was still a ways off.
They Wrote ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’ in Between Séances and Pranks
Listening to the opening riff of “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath”, it’s easy to imagine the notes ringing out against the stone walls of the Clearwell Castle dungeon. Black Sabbath seems to fit right at home in a medieval castle supposedly haunted by centuries-dead ghosts. And while that might be true on a musical and aesthetic level, that didn’t mean the musicians were immune to getting the daylights scared out of them. “We wound each other up so much none of us got any sleep,” Ozzy Osbourne recalled in I Am Ozzy. “You’d just lie there with your eyes wide open, expecting an empty suit of armour to walk into your bedroom at any second.”
Of course, it didn’t help that the band spent most of their downtime pranking one another. (Tony Iommi was the biggest prankster, and drummer Bill Ward was the most frequent victim, per Osbourne.) The group performed séances, flung dressmaker dummies out of windows, and tied thread around objects in people’s bedrooms so that the prankster could tug on it, making it look like the item was moving on its own.
“Bill got the worst of it,” Osbourne wrote. “One night, he’d been on the cider and had passed out on the sofa. We got this full-length mirror and lifted it over him. Then, we poked him until he woke up. The second he opened his eyes, all he could see was himself staring back. To this day, I’ve never heard a grown man scream so loud. He must have thought he’d woken up in hell.”
Nothing like deathly terror to shock the system and provide musical inspiration.
Photo by Watal Asanuma/Shinko Music/Getty Images