![]() ![]() But that’s the beauty of what happens: it’s the fans who decided this was a great song.October 1971. I don’t think we believed at the time that it would turn out to be so special. But, over the years, ‘Iron Man’ has grown and grown. ![]() “We never thought of ourselves as a singles band anyway. “I think it worked best at the time in the context of the album,” Ward agreed. And out of all the songs Butler has penned over the years, this may very well be his masterpiece. It’s easy to praise the bone-crunching drums, the shimmering production design, but for my money, it’s the lyrical content that makes it stand out from the other songs that were released in 1970. Weirdly, the single failed to chart in Britain, although the song has certainly made an impact, making it one of the band works Osbourne has been happy to perform as a solo artist. No less a luminary than John Lydon admitted to enjoying the group, precisely because they were so tight on their delivery, and so deadly in their resolve. But just as the danger becomes too great, the vocals stop, and Iommi breaks into a suitably ferocious guitar passage. ![]() There’s no sense of levity in the track, as the characters walk into a danger they are sure to die from. More likely, he was influenced by “Tin Lizzie”, a robot who featured regularly in the British comic (Dublin rockers Thin Lizzy got their name from the character.) Black Sabbath agreed to let Marvel use the tune for their 2008 opus, Iron Man, although Butler chuckled that it started people asking him if he was inspired by the Tony Stark character.įuelled by the drums behind him, Osbourne delivers one of his more committed vocals, wailing across the instruments like a crow warning its young of the impending danger. Listeners who were happy before listening to the song, were less happy with their lives immediately afterwards.Ĭontrary to popular opinion, Butler was unfamiliar with the Marvel Iron Man comic book but was an avid reader of The Dandy. But if the album holds a masterpiece, it’s ‘Iron Man’, a sparsely produced rock number that oozes charmism, atmosphere and anxiety. The album is rife with science-fiction references, but the album also holds not one, but two anti-war protest anthems, the first being the guitar-heavy ‘War Pigs’ and the latter was ‘Hand of Doom’, a lament to the soldiers recovering from the battlefields to recovering from heroin addiction. The tune features on Paranoid, the band’s second album, and comes directly after the more Latin-flavoured ‘Planet Caravan’. Today it would be so easy for a band to get the proper sound on a song like this, because the technology exist.” In the end, they did an excellent job under the circumstances. For Rodger and Tom, trying to make ‘Iron Man’ work was so tough. I played very loud back then, and wanted a powerful bass drum sound that’s what the song needed. “The trouble was that the microphones available to us in 1970 just weren’t up to the task of capturing the power and depth of the sound. “Technically, we had real problems getting it right in the studio,” Ward recalled. As if matching the anger of the track, Ward created a barrelling drum contribution that emulated the noise of an iron being, lost in foreign terrain. ![]()
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