There aren’t many bands that could seemingly haunt a haunted castle, but if you were to give anyone a fair chance, it would have to be Ozzy Osbourne and his band Black Sabbath.
The group are notorious for their antics on tour, but it wasn’t just snorting ants and destroying hotel rooms on the road that got them their well-earned reputation for being some of rock and roll’s ultimate hellraisers.
When most bands head to the studio, they do so to work. The shows on tour are fun, and life on the road promotes a certain hedonism that is hard to turn down. But getting into the studio should be the moment to buckle down and begin working hard to create your record and make your fans and artistic self happy. That is, of course, unless you are Black Sabbath.
The band were famous for their in-studio raucousness, having routinely smuggled cocaine into wherever they had set up shop to lay down their tracks. The quartet were wild. They would paint each other silver, set each other on fire, and just generally misbehave. But one session almost saw the end of the band, the end of Ozzy Osbourne and yet, somehow, the Prince of Darkness still considers it “the pinnacle of Black Sabbath”.
The 1973 release Sabbath Bloody Sabbath features a man lying on the bed being attacked by demons on the cover, and if the stories are to be believed, that feels very close to the group’s experience recording it. The band went to a huge, apparently haunted castle in Wales to lay down the tracks for the record, and it would result in some of the strangest stories the group ever produced.
“So we rented a castle in Wales, which, yes, was supposedly haunted,” explained Tony Iommi, perhaps the group’s more sensible member. “Bill [Ward] saw this ghost jump out the window in his room, so he started taking this big dagger to bed with him. He said if he saw the ghost, he was going to stab it. As if you can stab a ghost!” Now, it might be enough to imagine Ward moving around his room and stabbing thin air in an attempt to kill an apparently dead soul, but things did get a little stranger.
Osbourne was prone to drinking until he blacked out, and on one occasion, it almost resulted in a castle-wide fire that would have certainly killed him and possibly the band had they not reacted quickly. “We almost lost Ozzy,” explains Iommi. “We had a room with a big fireplace. Ozzy had a big fire going, but had fallen asleep when a piece of coal tumbled onto the carpet. We forced our way in, and the room was ablaze!”
Osbourne remembered that near-fatal evening: “I’d set my foot on fire. We were so hellbent on frightening each other, we frightened ourselves. We then made a collective decision to fucking stop this coke thing – it was destroying us.”
Of course, that was not the end of their drug use, as Osbourne cheekily explained: “I started sniffing it behind the amps, where they couldn’t see me.”
What is the most preposterous thing about a haunted castle studio where the drummer tried to kill a ghost and the lead singer almost died in a fire? It produced one of the greatest records. As Iommi explained: “We set up our gear in the dungeons, and it was a great vibe for coming up with ideas. When we wrote Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, all these riffs started coming out. We started using synthesisers, too — musically, we went to another level.”
The brooding singer went one further to claim it was the moment the band peaked: “That, to me, was the pinnacle of Black Sabbath.”
Would Sabbath Bloody Sabbath have sounded as good in a studio as it did in a haunted castle? Unlikely. Black Sabbath was a band built on mystery and danger; they embodied the very nature of everything the castle was. If an album cover is to be believed, then Sabbath Bloody Sabbath may be true to life, except there should be four members of the band on the bed, and rather than being tortured by ghouls, they should be high-fiving them for a job well done.
