When their 2013 comeback album 13 also made Number 1, they set an Official Charts record for the longest gap between chart-topping LPs: a full 43 years.
Ozzy – who has died aged 76 – and Black Sabbath made their last ever live appearances just two weeks ago at Back to the Beginning, a massive, multi-band benefit concert held at Villa Park in Birmingham.
To celebrate their incredible legacy, we’ve crunched the numbers to reveal, for the first time ever, their Top 20 most streamed songs in the UK. But first, let’s take a closer look at the Top 3, which all come from their seminal 1970 album Paranoid.
MORE: Where every Black Sabbath song and album has charted in the UK
3. War Pigs
Released: 1970
Official Singles Chart peak: n/a
Total UK streams: 36.2 million
The opening song from Paranoid is a blunt and bludgeoning anti-war anthem. According to Geezer Butler, it’s “totally against the Vietnam War”, which was raging at the time, and is “about how these rich politicians and rich people start all the wars for their benefit and get all the poor people to die for them”.
It’s such a seminal metal song that fellow Black Country legends Judas Priest have used it as their walk-on song since 2011.
2. Iron Man
Released: 1970
Official Singles Chart peak: n/a
Total UK streams: 45.7 million
This metal behemoth was originally titled ‘Iron Bloke’ because Ozzy observed that its distinctive guitar riff sounded “like a big iron bloke walking about”. It has nothing to do with the Marvel character of the same name, but tells the story of an astronaut who sees the future of the world from space.
“Then he goes through a magnetic storm on the way back and is turned to iron,” Geezer Butler explained. “He’s trying to warn everyone about the future of the world, but he can’t speak, so everyone is taking the mickey out of him all the time, and he just doesn’t care in the end.”
1. Paranoid
Released: 1970
Official Singles Chart peak: Number 4
Total UK streams: 119 million
Incredibly, given that it’s widely regarded as one of the greatest metal songs ever, Paranoid was written in just 20 minutes. “The song Paranoid was written as an afterthought,” Geezer Butler told Guitar World magazine in 2004. “We basically needed a three-minute filler for the album, and Tony came up with the riff. I quickly did the lyrics, and Ozzy was reading them as he was singing.”
Fittingly, it became the last song Black Sabbath ever played live when it concluded the Back to the Beginning concert on July 5.
Black Sabbath’s Official Top 20 most-streamed songs ever: