{"id":567142,"date":"2025-11-13T07:26:23","date_gmt":"2025-11-13T07:26:23","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/567142\/"},"modified":"2025-11-13T07:26:23","modified_gmt":"2025-11-13T07:26:23","slug":"the-black-sabbath-album-the-whole-band-agreed-was-the-worst","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/567142\/","title":{"rendered":"The Black Sabbath album the whole band agreed was “the worst”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Black<\/p>\n

Credits: Ross Halfin Photography<\/p>\n

Wed 12 November 2025 19:30, UK <\/p>\n

Considering they nearly killed their own drummer by spraying his penis with a \u201chighly toxic\u201d aerosol, consistency was never going to be a defining tenet of Black Sabbath<\/a>.<\/p>\n

While the likes of Vol 4, nicknamed Snowblind by the band owing to the meteorological amounts of cocaine they were consuming in their Bel Air mansion, might have pried a classic from the clutches of chaos, with Ozzy calling it \u201cone of Black Sabbath\u2019s best-ever albums,\u201d it was always going to be difficult to keep that up.<\/p>\n

By 1978, the wheels were coming off, and Ozzy was struggling to pour his orange juice. A weariness had set in, and the group were facing an identity crisis. \u201cWe were sick of each other, too,\u201d Ozzy told the Guardian while snacking on sausage rolls, \u201cYou don\u2019t even want to be around your wife all the time and you married her.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

But it wasn\u2019t just the endless hours that they had spent on the road together that was irking them. They were, to some extent, sick of themselves, too. The whole Sabbath was proving to be a heavy albatross. \u201cNone of us wanted to drag this black magic shit around forever so we tried to get a bit modern.\u201d <\/p>\n

Alas, the result of that experiment on Never Say Die proved that \u201cyou should stick to what you know best.\u201d In time, it would become a record that the group would revile, with Ozzy literally saying he was \u201cashamed\u201d of it, and that\u2019s a man who once shamelessly beheaded two doves, and that\u2019s his lesser-known beheading<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think it\u2019s disgusting,\u201d Ozzy said of the gloopy album. \u201cIt was the worst piece of work that I\u2019ve ever had anything to do with,\u201d he added regarding the record that saw him leave the band months later. But he wasn\u2019t alone. Geezer Butler also said that Never Say Die was \u201ceasily the worst\u201d Black Sabbath album.<\/p>\n

\"Tony<\/a>Tony Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne reunited. (Credits: Tony Iommi)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe reason for that is we tried to manage ourselves and produce the record ourselves,\u201d Butler said of the band that even a professional team of managers had struggled to manage. \u201cWe wanted to do it on our own, but in truth, not one of us had a single clue about what to do. By that point, we were spending more time with lawyers and in court rather than being in the studio writing. It was just too much pressure on us, and the writing suffered,\u201d he told Metal Edge.<\/p>\n

Simply put, they were doing too much at once \u2013 trying to capture every sound that had inspired them, from early Fleetwood Mac to even nabbing Todd Rundgren\u2019s arranger, in a bid to reinvent their sound, self-managing, taking drugs, and falling out along the way. The recordings were a mess, and things were manic.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe were getting really drugged out, doing a lot of dope<\/a>,\u201d Tony Iommi recalls. \u201cWe\u2019d go down to the sessions, and have to pack up because we were too stoned, we\u2019d have to stop. Nobody could get anything right, we were all over the place, everybody\u2019s playing a different thing. We\u2019d go back and sleep it off, and try again the next day.\u201d<\/p>\n

In fairness, that had always been the case. Apparently, for Snowblind, according to Butler, their manager had presented them with a startling bill. \u201cWhether you can believe him or not, the record cost, I think, $65,000, and the cocaine bill was $75,000.\u201d But they were younger, fresher, and more enthused then. And they hadn\u2019t spent years on the road together building up little substance-addled resentments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

So, while it might be a sore spot in the band\u2019s discography, not one of them was ever left wondering why. That inevitability might have been enough to kill the original run of the band, but curiously, it\u2019s a great measure of their searing originality that the likes of Kim Thayil and Dave Mustaine have both heaped huge praise upon it.<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

Related Topics<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Credits: Ross Halfin Photography Wed 12 November 2025 19:30, UK Considering they nearly killed their own drummer by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":567143,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3936],"tags":[19160,77,269,16,15],"class_list":{"0":"post-567142","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-music","8":"tag-black-sabbath","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-music","11":"tag-uk","12":"tag-united-kingdom"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/115541206539088864","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567142","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=567142"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/567142\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/567143"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=567142"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=567142"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=567142"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}