Between 1970 and 1972, Black Sabbath released four albums that still stand as one of the greatest hot streaks in rock – Black Sabbath, Paranoid, Master Of Reality and Vol. 4. But when it came to making their fifth album, they found the tank was empty.
"I got writer’s block," said Tony Iommi. "It just went dead. We had the studio booked. And it was just one of those times. I really panicked: ‘Oh my God, I can’t seem to think of anything that we like!’. I could play stuff, but it just wasn’t sinking in; I didn’t like it."
An attempt to write new songs in Los Angeles ended in failure. Panicked, the band returned to the UK and rented Clearwell Castle, in the Forest Of Dean, where things swiftly became spooky.
"We were in the dungeon playing away, and all of a sudden we saw this person walk past the door [with] a big black cloak on," said Geezer Butler. "We thought, 'What the hell is going on around here?' Tony and one of the roadies ran after him. They saw him go into this other door at the end of the corridor.
"They ran after him and they were shouting at him, because they thought he was some lunatic who got into the castle. They went into the room where he had gone into and there was nobody in there; he totally disappeared. We asked the owner of the castle about it, and he told us, 'Oh, that's just a ghost.' Apparently, he was the regular castle ghost! We all saw it. Tony went after him. You couldn't miss him wearing that big black cloak."
The ghostly apparition did the trick. The Rifflord was back.
“And then that was it," said Iommi. "We came up with Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and the rest came fairly shortly afterwards. The block had gone.”
Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler was blown away when Iommi presented the riff to the rest of the band.
“When Tony came up with the riff to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, it was almost like seeing your first child being born. It was the end of our musical drought… It meant the band had a present – and a future – again.”
While that signature riff is truly monumental, as with all the great Sabbath songs, there’s more to it than one thing. ‘Nobody will ever let you know/When you ask the reasons why,’ sings Ozzy, during a moment’s respite from Iommi’s razor-sharp blitzkrieg, lending the song a light-and-shade dynamic, while the song concludes with a long, instrumental jam section, à la Children Of The Grave.
“The outro to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is the heaviest shit I have ever heard in my life.’ said Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash. “To this day, I haven’t heard anything as heavy that has as much soul.”
As with the majority of Sabbath’s early material, Butler was the song’s lyricist.
“The lyrics were about the Sabbath experience, the ups and downs, the good times and the bad times, the ripoffs, the business side of it all,” he said. “‘Bog blast all of you’ was directed at the critics, the record business, the lawyers, the accountants, management, and everyone who was trying to cash in on us. It was a backs-to-the-wall rant at everyone.”
Released as the album’s lead-off single, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was the first Sabbath song to have a promo shot to accompany it. In it, the group don’t mime the lyrics or fake playing their instruments – in fact they don’t even bother to pick up their instruments at all – as they waltz through what appears to be a forest.
“That was Geezer’s garden we were walking around in,” Iommi recalled of the ‘forest’ scene. “What I remember about that is that we just turned up and that was it, really: ‘We’re doing a video!’”
The single featured a rather abrupt fade that removed the outro Slash loved, leaving the song a full two minutes shorter than the album version. It failed to chart, but Sabbath Bloody Sabbath's place in the pantheon of rock was secure. Readers of Classic Rock voted it the fourth-best Black Sabbath song of all time, while Rolling Stone's put it at number nine.
It's been covered many times, by everyone from thrash veterans Anthrax to viking metallers Amon Amarth via novelty bluegrass rockers Hayseed Dixie. Some of the covers have been unexpectedly poor – Guns N' Roses' version at Black Sabbath's Back To The Beginning show in 2025 was marred by Axl Rose struggling to match the cadence of Ozzy's original vocal – and some have been unexpectedly great.
"One that surprised me, quite honestly, out of all the people that have covered our songs, was the Swedish band [the] Cardigans," said Iommi. "They recorded Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. I heard it on a radio station in Sweden. The DJ played it for me. I couldn’t believe it. I thought, ‘What’s this?’ I thought it was a joke at first. I was amazed at the treatment they’d done to it. It’s really good and different. Sang sweet and nice."
