Black Sabbath didn’t emerge from nowhere. All four members had previously spent a few years kicking around the West Midlands scene in various bands – guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward in blues rockers Mythology, and bassist Geezer Butler and singer Ozzy Osbourne in The Rare Breed.
Both of those bands plied their trade in the pubs and clubs of Birmingham and further afield. And so did Sabbath when they formed in late July or early August of 1968 as The Polka Tulk Blues Band, later renaming themselves Polka Tulk, and later still Earth. Back then, they played such venues as The Crown pub in the centre of Birmingham and Mothers in the suburb of Erdington. But it would be a gig on August 1, 1969 at a blues club in Lichfield, when they were still called Earth, that would change music forever.
The Polka Tulk Blues Band made their first public appearance at the County Ballroom in Carlisle, where Mythology had built up a strong local following. At the time, they were a six piece, with Ozzy, Tony, Geezer and Bill augmented by second guitarist Jim Phillips and saxophone player Alan Clark.
“We went down like The Titanic,” Geezer told Metal Hammer of that first gig. “I was told that I couldn’t play bass properly and that Ozzy was a shit singer. Then we were in a massive brawl while we were loading up the van. So all in all, not a great experience. We decided to become a four piece, rather than a six piece after these gigs. Bill suggested the name Earth.”
The newly slimmed-down and rechristened band’s early setlists consisted entirely of covers. “We were doing 12 bar blues and jazzy songs, which were more just to do stuff to get gigs,” Tony Iommi told Metal Hammer in 2020.”
It was enough to attract the attention of Jim Simpson, a local manager who looked after a handful of Birmingham bands. Simpson had recently started a new blues club, Henry’s Blues House, which took place every Tuesday night at The Crown pub new Birmingham’s New Street Station. Ozzy and Geezer both attended the opening night, which featured local band Bakerloo.
“I got talking to them and found out they played in a band,” Jim Simpson. “They said, ‘Can we play the opening slot.’ They soon became the headliner, one of the biggest attractions we had. And they asked me to manage them, so I said, ‘Yes.’ They were totally serious about it. They’d go anywhere and play anywhere they could.”
But the four of them knew they could only get so far with a set full of cover versions. They began to start writing songs of their own in the community centre in Aston where they rehearsed. The first song they came up with was the jazzy Wicked World. But it was the second song, written in late July 1969, that would be the game-changer.
“I’d seen King Crimson and they used to do Holst’s Planets Suite, the Mars bit,” Geezer told Metal Hammer. “It sounded really ominous. I started messing about with it on bass one day, and I don’t know if it got stuck in Tony’s head, but he picked up his guitar and started playing the riff. I thought, ‘Yeah, that’s what we want.’ It had a totally different vibe to anything else we were playing at the time, which was blues-orientated. It had no blues overtones.”
On August 1, Earth were due to play a gig at The Old Pokey Hole Blues Club in the town of Lichfield, 18 miles north of Birmingham. It was there that they decided to premiere the unnamed new song they’d written.
Geezer Butler remembered the impact the song had. “People were ordering drinks and stuff, and we thought, ‘Let’s do that song we just wrote,’” he told Metal Hammer. “The whole place went, ‘What on earth is this?!’ It was nuts. The crowd went mental. I thought, ‘Fucking hell, we’re onto something.’”
Ozzy himself had a different slightly different, if hazier recollection. “I don’t remember where we first played Black Sabbath,” the singer wrote in his 2010 autobiography I Am Ozzy, “but I can sure as hell remember the audience’s reaction: all the girls ran out of the venue, screaming. ‘Isn’t the whole point of being in a band to get a shag, not to make chicks run away?’ I complained to the others, afterwards. ‘They’ll get used to it,’ Geezer told me.”
At that point, the song didn’t have a name. But Geezer remembered his older brother telling him about a horror movie he’d seen a few years earlier, starring Boris Karloff. Its title? Black Sabbath. It wasn’t just perfect for such a terrifying piece of music, it was perfect for Earth themselves.
By the time they played their next gig, at the Star Club in Hamburg on August 10, they had changed their name to Black Sabbath. The starting pistol had been fired on heavy metal.
