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Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford has never shied away from expressing his love for heavy metal pioneers Black Sabbath.
He understands the quartet better than most as a fellow Brummie, metal icon, and friend. Over the course of his career, the goateed vocalist has been keen to discuss the impact of Ozzy Osbourne and the band on the world.
The story of Black Sabbath is a famous one. After emerging from the depths of Birmingham in 1970 with two albums, their debut Black Sabbath in February and the follow-up Paranoid in September, the group laid the foundations for the genre that would become known as heavy metal. After this breakout year, they quickly rose to become one of the most successful and influential groups rock has ever seen.
They followed this duo of releases up with Master of Reality and Vol.4 in the space of just two years, which cemented their place in history. After this, the unit began to fray, with the trappings of fame and the quartet’s penchant for hellraising starting to take its toll.
Part of what made Black Sabbath so revolutionary was how radically different they sounded from virtually every major rock band around them at the dawn of the 1970s. While many groups of the era still leaned heavily on blues rock, psychedelia or folk experimentation, Sabbath introduced something darker, slower and more oppressive, reflecting the industrial environment they emerged from in Birmingham.
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Their music carried a sense of weight and menace that felt entirely new, laying the emotional and sonic foundations for countless heavy metal subgenres that followed.
Halford’s admiration for ‘Paranoid’ also speaks to the song’s unusual balance between accessibility and heaviness. Despite its crushing riff and dark atmosphere, the track possessed an immediacy and energy that allowed it to break far beyond underground rock audiences.
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For aspiring musicians like Halford, it demonstrated that heavy music could still be concise, memorable and culturally massive without compromising its intensity, a lesson Judas Priest would later help refine throughout the 1970s and 1980s.
This arc culminated with frontman Osbourne leaving in 1978. An extended period of revolving doors ensued, with various members coming and going before the original lineup finally reunited nearly two decades later in 1997.
Halford enjoyed a brief stint fronting Black Sabbath in the period just before Osbourne would reunite with them, meaning he’s well suited for analysing how they changed the world, as he’s experienced their secrets first-hand.
When speaking to Rolling Stone in late 2021, he picked his favourite songs of all time, and the first one he mentioned was Sabbath’s ‘Paranoid’ from the album of the same name. Explaining how the track “lit up the world”, he described it as a “game-changing” moment.
Halford said: “‘Paranoid’ is my number one song. I tell you guys, all of these ten are my number one, but we have to do lists, right? So, at the top of the list is ‘Paranoid’ by Black Sabbath.”
He continued, “For me, it was one of these game-changing moments that we have in music because it brought out and brought forth a genre and a style of music that lit up the world and is what we call a ‘game-changer’ in the great effect that it had for so many of us. Particularly for me as a young musician at the time, ‘Paranoid’ just took off like a heavy metal rocket.”
Watch Halford discuss some of his favourite songs, below.
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