7. Black SabbathSabotage
I was into Sabbath when I was 15, 16. I had older friends who were into the Birthday Party and the Virgin Prunes, but they were also into Alice Cooper and Sabbath. Non-ironically. I’d always been aware of these records, there was never a part of me that just associated Black Sabbath with teenage boys in denim jackets who also had Iron Maiden patches on, all that kind of crap. In my mind Sabbath were always up there with Bowie. You could listen to them with the newer stuff, like Birthday Party. Sabotage, which is their sixth album, is almost impossible to listen to all the way through because it is so flawed. It’s almost the end of Ozzy’s quest, through these six albums, to find his brain. It’s like a man has removed his brain, and booted it into a black hole. Sabotage is the sound of a man in the black hole trying to find his brain. Of course, he doesn’t come out with it. He comes out, and it’s the rest of Ozzy, for the rest of his life. I think it’s one of the most insane records ever made. It’s clearly massively expensive and over the top. There’s a song called ‘Symptom Of The Universe’ where they’ve reduced the riff down to its basic essentials, and then it goes into this two-part epic where Ozzy sings these ludicrous lyrics about Jesus and whatnot. It’s this image of a man scrabbling for sanity that’s long gone.
