It shows just how Sabbath helped turn the 1960s into the 1970s – here we have the kind of hallucinogenic imagery you might find in technicolour psych rock, but with a considerably darker bent. The delayed stereo panning that starts the song is plenty trippy, and makes for an excellent closer to Paranoid – a palette-cleanse from the straightforward heaviness of the majority of the record, albeit not as relaxed as Planet Caravan. Fairies Wear Boots ( Paranoid, 1970)įairies Wear Boots’ intro riff is weird. We owe the creation of countless guitarists to Tony Iommi’s thunderous, downtuned riffs and deft but expressive soling. But it was the combination of this heavy blues-rock with an occult aesthetic, an ominous atmosphere and a much-needed name change that truly resonated with the times, and still resonates today. Their early work – first as Polka Tulk Blues Band and later as Earth – was mostly derivative of British blues greats in the vein of Cream and the Yardbirds. And in the working-class suburbs of Birmingham, Flower Power was particularly hard to swallow: the future looked like one thing, and that was a job in a factory.Īnd so Black Sabbath’s four original members – Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne – turned to music as an escape. The end of the conflict was nowhere to be seen. In the UK, young men feared they too would be drafted. As veterans returned to the US, the stark reality of the Vietnam war came with them. The hippie communes had either collapsed or taken a dark turn. Young hopefuls of the late 60s had to reconcile with the fact that the countercultural movements of the past decade had essentially failed. However, they were ultimately a product of their time – an inevitable musical comedown as the optimism of the 1960s crumbled. READ MORE: Muse’s 10 greatest guitar moments, rankedīlack Sabbath’s monolithic influence on all things heavy cannot be overstated.The world has Birmingham to thank for heavy metal, as well as Cadbury’s chocolate and the Balti Triangle. When four weird blokes from Birmingham formed the blues-rock band Earth in the late 60s, it’s unlikely that they thought they would go on to inform basically the rest of rock history – but that’s exactly what they did.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |