In January 1970, it finally happened.
We got a record deal.
For a few months, Jim Simpson had been shopping us around by inviting all these big-wigs from London to come to our gigs. But no one was interested. Then one night a guy from Philips drove up to Birmingham to see us play at Henry’s Blues House and decided to take a bet on us. The name Black Sabbath made a big difference, I think. At the time there was an occult author called Dennis Wheatley whose books were all over the bestseller lists, Hammer Horror films were doing massive business at the cinemas, and the Manson murders were all over the telly, so anything with a ‘dark’ edge was in big demand. Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure we could’ve done it on the strength of the music alone. But sometimes, when it comes to getting a deal, all these little things have to come together at the right time.
You need a bit of luck, basically.
Another thing that helped was the fact that Philips was setting up a new ‘underground’ label called Vertigo when we were looking for a deal. We were a perfect fit. But the funny thing was that Vertigo wasn’t even up and running in time for our first single, ‘Evil Woman’, so it was originally released on another Philips label, Fontana, before being reissued on Vertigo a few weeks later.
Not that it made any fucking difference: the song went down like a concrete turd both times. But we didn’t care,
because the BBC played it on Radio 1.
Once.
At six o’clock in the morning.
I was so nervous, I got up at five and drank about eight cups of tea. ‘They won’t play it,’ I kept telling myself, ‘They won’t play it…’
But then:
BLAM… BLAM…
Dow-doww…
BLAM…
Dow-dow-d-d-dow, dooooow…
D-d-d-d-d-d-d-d-d
DUH-DA!
Do-doo-do
DUH-DA!
Do-doo-do…
It’s impossible to describe what it feels like to hear yourself on Radio 1 for the first time. It was magic, squared. I ran around the house screaming, ‘I’m on the radio! I’m on the fucking radio!’ until my mum stomped downstairs in her nightie and told me to shut up. ‘Evil woman,’ I sang to her, at full volume, ‘Don’t you play your games with me!’ Then I was off, out of the door, singing my head off all the way down Lodge Road.
But if being played on Radio 1 was good, it was nothing compared with the advance we got from Philips: ?105 each!
I’d never even had ten quid to call my own before, never mind a hundred. It would have taken me a whole year of tuning car horns at the Lucas factory to earn that kind of dough. I thought I was Jack the Lad that week. The first thing I bought was a bottle of Brut aftershave to make myself smell better. Then I got a new pair of shoes, ’cos I’d destroyed my old ones in Denmark. The rest I gave to my mum to pay the bills. But then I kept scrounging it back off her, so I could go down the pub and celebrate.
Then it was back to work.
As far as I can remember, we didn’t have any demos to speak of, and there was no official talk about making an album. Jim just told us one day that we’d been booked for a week of gigs in Zurich, and that on our way down there, we should stop off at Regent Sound studios in Soho and record some tracks with a producer called Rodger Bain and his engineer, Tom Allom. So that’s what we did. Like before, we just set up our gear and played what amounted to a live set without the audience. Once we’d finished, we spent a couple of hours double-tracking some of the guitar and the vocals, and that was that. Done. We were in the pub in time for last orders. It can’t have taken any longer than twelve hours in total.
That’s how albums should be made, in my opinion. I don’t give a fuck if you’re making the next Bridge Over Troubled Water—taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N’ Roses did, is just fucking ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career’s died, been resurrected, and then died again.
In our case, mind you, we didn’t have the luxury of taking our time. It wasn’t an option. So we just went in there and did it. And then the next day we set off for Zurich in the Transit to do a residency at a joint called the Hirschen Club. We hadn’t even heard Rodger and Tom’s final mix when we left Soho, never mind seen the album cover. That’s how the music business was run in those days. As a band, you had less say in what was going on than the guy who cleaned out the shitter in the record company’s executive suite. I remember it being a long, long way to Switzerland in the back of a Transit van. To kill time, we smoked dope. Shitloads of it. When we finally got to Zurich, we were so fucking hungry we found one of those posh Swiss caffs and held a competition to see who could eat the most banana splits in the shortest time. I managed to get twenty-five of the fuckers down my throat before the owner chucked us out. My whole face was covered in cream by the end of it. I could have had a couple more of them, too.
Then we had to go and find the Hirschen Club, which turned out to be even sleazier than the Star Club. They had this tiny little stage with the bar just a few feet away, and it was dark and there were hookers hanging around all over the place. The four of us had to share one crappy room upstairs, so getting a chick with her own place was the order of the day.
One night, these two girls in fishnets invited me and Geezer back to their apartment. They were obviously on the game, but I was up for anything that would spare me from another night of sharing a bed with Bill, who spent the whole time complaining about my smelly feet.
So when they sweetened the deal by saying they had some dope, I said, ‘Fuck it, let’s go.’ But Geezer wasn’t so sure. ‘They’re hookers, Ozzy,’ he kept saying. ‘You’ll catch something nasty. Let’s find some other chicks.’
‘I ain’t gonna bonk either of ’em,’ I said. ‘I just wanna get out of this fucking place.’
‘I’ll believe that when I see it,’ said Geezer. ‘The dark-haired chick isn’t so bad-looking.
After a few beers and a few puffs of the magic weed, she’ll have her way with me.’
‘Look,’ I said, ‘if she makes a move on yer, I’ll kick her up the arse and we’ll leave, all right?’
‘Promise?’
‘If she makes one move towards your knob, Geezer, I’ll pull her off you and we’ll fuck off.’
‘All right.’
So we go back to their place. It’s all dimly lit, and Geezer’s on one side of the room with the dark-haired chick, and I’m on the other side with the ugly one, and we’re smoking weed and listening to the album by Blind Faith, the ‘supergroup’ formed by Eric Clapton, Ginger Baker, Steve Winwood and Ric Grech. For a while it’s all serene and trippy—the music’s playing and everyone’s snogging and fumbling around. Then, all of a sudden, this deep Brummie voice rises out of the mist of dope smoke.
‘Oi, Ozzy,’ says Geezer. ‘Time to put the boot in.’
I looked over and this hooker was straddling him as he lay there with his eyes closed and this pained expression on his face. I honestly thought it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen in my life.
I don’t even know if he shagged her in the end. I just remember laughing and laughing and laughing until I cried.
Jim Simpson wanted to see us at his house as soon as we got back from Switzerland.
‘I’ve got something you need to see,’ he said, in this ominous voice.
So that afternoon we all met up in his living room and sat there, twiddling our thumbs, wondering what the fuck he was going to say. He reached into his briefcase and pulled out the finished record of Black Sabbath. We were speechless. The cover was a spooky-looking fifteenth-century watermill (I later found out it was the Mapledurham Watermill on the River Thames in Oxfordshire), with all these dead leaves around it and a sickly looking woman with long dark hair, dressed in black robes, standing in the middle of the frame with a scary look on
