(Credits: Far Out / Album Cover)
Wed 11 June 2025 2:00, UK
It’s a source of fierce debate among Black Sabbath fans as to which one is the Birmingham heavy metal pioneers’ defining album. Anything post-Ozzy Osbourne can safely be pushed aside, and the preceding three LPs from 1975’s Sabotage start to see their magic ebb, although still containing fantastic cuts such as ‘The Thrill of It All’ and ‘You Won’t Change Me’. From 1970’s eponymous debut, however, Black Sabbath boast an astonishing five-album run of occultist doom blues that stands as metal’s essential foundational oeuvre.
While fights may break out over their best, there’s little dispute as to Black Sabbath’s perfect introduction. Released only a few months after their debut, 1970’s Paranoid saw the band tighter, meaner, lyrically more evocative, and the riffs dialled up to immortal heft.
Featuring live staples ‘War Pigs’, ‘Iron Man’ and its proto-punk stomper of a title track, Paranoid pulled the self-titled Black Sabbath away from its woodland coven shadows towards an unnerving anchorage in grim reality, flashing a grubby riposte against the hippy hangover yet to realise peace and love was over, and channelling Vietnam’s napalm storm clouds.
Such heady thematic dwellings informed the original idea to name their second LP War Pigs after the album’s opener. Due to potential controversy with American troops still in Vietnam and the ‘Paranoid’ single doing well on both sides of the Atlantic, Warner Records rejected the title and pushed for their sophomore to be named after the current hit.
The art department hadn’t got the memo, however. Still operating under the War Pigs brief, Keith McMillan, responsible for Black Sabbath’s first four album covers and later promo video director for Kate Bush and Motörhead, travelled to Buckinghamshire’s Black Park in Wexham. He dressed his assistant, Roger Brown, in pink and yellow garb, wielding a sword and shield, and sporting a motorcycle helmet. Shots were also made with Brown donning a pig mask, but deemed a little too on the nose with no surviving archive of the scrapped swine snaps.
Supposedly approximating what a “war pig” may look like, McMillan somewhat obscures the absurd costume with long photography exposures and glowing effects. Shot at night, ultraviolet lights and flashes that warped the test shoots were enough for the label, grabbing it quickly in a panicked need for any artwork, pronto.
Black Sabbath it wasn’t. The band weren’t thrilled with the results, and even more baffled by the concept seemingly removed from the album’s revised title. “That album title had nothing to do with the sleeve,” Osbourne stated on 1998’s Classic Albums. “What the fuck does a bloke dressed as a pig with a sword in his hand got to do with being paranoid? I don’t know, but they decided to change the album title without changing the artwork.”
Black Sabbath would outdo themselves on the band cover front with Sabotage, and a string of tacky artwork would dog the later years long past their prime in Ozzy’s absence. However, while Paranoid was a misfire, the blurred cartoon figure has grown to become an arresting image in the metal landscape, so long as one’s not paying too much attention to Brown’s fancy-dress clobber.
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