BLACK SABBATH RUINED MY LIFE
Confessions of a Black Sabbath fan: Episode One
by Hugh Gilmour
It was my first (and I was praying my last) Glastonbury mudfest when I first saw
the words "BLACK SABBATH RUINED MY LIFE" emblazoned on the front of a t-shirt of
a passing punter. Sipping lemon cider from a waxed paper cup whilst sitting
outside a beer tent, it made me laugh out loud, but also made me wish that the
Sabbs were on the bill, as it would have definitely cheered my mud-soaked-self
up. I managed to pick up one of those shirts at the following year's Ozzfest in
Milton Keynes. It seemed to sum up so much to me and my life since discovering
heavy metal at around the age of eleven, twenty five years ago. Sure, Black
Sabbath can't be held solely responsible for ruining my life, as motörhead, Iron
Maiden and Kerrang! magazine must also have some accountability in this. I was
once stopped by some female hick in one of Las Vegas's grimier casinos, and
asked "Did they really ruin yer life? They ruined mah life too," in a drawn out
Southern drawl that wasn't looking for a hint of irony. They may have ruined my
life, for without them I might have wanted to look for a “normal” career; in the
military (as I grew up near Sandhurst), the police or as a lawyer; but I don't
have a single regret for that ruination. I got into heavy metal as much for
their sordidly enticing sleeves of flaming skulls, murderous ghouls, viking
warlords and robots spraying fluid at each other on lifts as the music held
within. I wanted a part of that, to create that art, and if nobody would let me,
I'd form a band so they'd have to let me paint my own LP covers.
In 1980 I loved both Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne with equal meausre, but I
have to confess that at the age of eleven I didn't know that Ozzy had even been
in Black Sabbath. I didn't know that Ronnie James Dio had been in Rainbow
either. I loved that first Blizzard Of Ozz album, even if the things I'd heard
about the singer from my school friends sounded quite horrific. That riff at the
start of 'I Don't Know' just sounded like the ...FUTURE! Equally, I loved
'Heaven And Hell', with it's sleeve featuring three suspended angels, smoking
and playing cards. And I loved the music. It was heavy, but it was melodic with
quiet passages that wouldn't annoy my mother. I vividly recall hearing their new
single, 'Turn Up The Night' played on Radio 1's Top 40 chart run down just
before setting off for school one morning, and it just sounded amazing. I went
out and bought it on a seven inch picture disc that featured the silhouette of a
dancing devil. This is one aspect that today's young music novice sadly misses;
that sense of discovery found by hearing the snatch of a track on the radio,
seeing a short clip on Top Of The Pops, or scouring the bargain bins of Our
Price for reduced compilation LPs so you could learn more about specific bands
and what they sounded like without having to spend all of your pocket money on
one LP by a single band only to find it was a complete duffer. Axe Attack Volume
Two featured a Black Sabbath song called 'Die Young', but confusingly the singer
didn't look or sound like the guy on Axe Attack Volume One, which featured three
minutes of the most vital fuzz-pedalled-rock music in the form of 'Paranoid'.
More frustratingly, just when I got a sense of line-ups and chronology, Dio left
and was replaced by Ian Gillan from Gillan, and apparently he used to be in a
band called Deep Purple that those blokes from Rainbow (them again) used to be
in to. Today, a quick browse through the web will give you all the information
you need, complete with sound samples or downloads, sent to your computer or to
your phone.
My mum bought me a guitar, a Korean Kay electric, managing to make a god awful
racket through my record player before it one day stopped working. I also
trawled the Record & Tape Exchange in Camden Town for Sabbath LPs every time we
visited my grandmother in Chalk Farm, just down the road. I bought a big, black
double compilation, as it seemed like value for money, even if I found that dead
looking girl holding a cross whilst laying in a coffin a bit too morbid. I
detuned my trusty Kay guitar, and strummed along to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and
Children Of the Grave. How good or bad a sleeve looked was a very big deciding
factor in my purchases. I thought Technical Ecstasy looked amazing. I even even
appreciated its clean white border, and this was copied into my sketchbook. I
bought the self-titled debut LP at Elephant Records in Aldershot, took it home
on a dark and gloomy autumn Saturday afternoon, and played it as loud as my
hi-fi would allow. My mother genuinely thought there was a thunder storm
outside, which alone justified my purchase. There was a spooky girl on the
grainy cover. And although it was a relatively simple image, it seemed to hold
so much drama and hidden menace.
Years later, after training to become an illustrator, I returned to my studies
in the hope of finding a more stable career as a graphic designer. After a year,
I was confident enough to turn an Apple Macintosh on and off, but little else,
but when I saw an advert in a local paper with a vacancy for a Mac Operator at a
record label in nearby Chessington, I figured I had little to lose by applying.
It looked like a slightly more appealing summer job than the one I had lined up
in Surbiton's Victoria Wine off license (liquor store). The record label was
Castle Communications PLC, a company that specialised in issuing deleted
catalogue on the still relatively new compact disc, previously only available on
12” vinyl LP. Castle Communications PLC had shrewdly picked up the supposedly
dead catalogues of labels such as Bronze and Pye, and had a knack for presenting
classic albums such as Aerosmith's Toys In The Attic, and make them look as
cheap as possible. After a second interview with the company, they offered me a
job with five grand more that I had asked for. I quit my degree and have never
looked back. Just two months prior to joining Castle Communications PLC, I had
finally completed my Black Sabbath collection on compact disc with the purchase
of Live At Last, bought for a fiver at Plymouth's indoor market. Castle
Communications PLC controlled the rights to that live album, as well as Black
Sabbath's first six studio albums, from that self titled debut up to 1975's
Sabotage, as well as their attendant compilation albums (another speciality of
the company). They looked awful. In all fairness, packaging for CD was still in
its infancy. LPs usually had a single sleeve, and maybe an inner bag or lyric
sheet, and if you were really lucky, a gatefold sleeve. The scope for how to
package CD in their little jewel cases had yet to be realised, and although the
music market has always been competitive, it didn’t feel in any way as tight and
competitive as it does today. If truth be told, I joined Castle Communications
PLC solely because they had Black Sabbath's catalogue AND it looked awful, but
specifically because it looked awful, one day it would have to be re-done more
sensitively, restoring the integrity of the original packaging and artwork, and
maybe adding extra elements if possible, and I was going to make sure I was
there when it happened. Black Sabbath weren't considered even remotely "cool" in
1993. Their post Ozzy albums had been a mixed bunch from the great to the not so
great, but I for one was grateful that one man, Tony Iommi, was insistent on
keeping that flame alive during those 16 or 17 Ozzy-less years, making sure that
the Black Sabbath name was headlining major venues each year.
So 2005 is something of an anniversary for me, as it was ten years ago that I
started work on re-vamping and restoring the artwork to Black Sabbath's first 15
albums, including lyrics and remastered audio. I insisted they include sleeve
notes, as I saw it was important for each album to have some sense of
perspective and some sense of history, but when I was told that there was no
budget to commission liner notes I just went ahead and wrote them myself, each
approved (by fax, in those pre-email days) by the respective managers, and
supplemented by photos courtesy of Ross Halfin and Chris Walter. Product
managers happily pointed out that I’d probably have been happy to have done it
for free (steady!), but I can’t deny that it was a labour of love. It was
imperative to me to ensure each was packaged in a way that myself as a fan would
want to buy, as we were expecting the punters to go out and buy CDs that they
already owned (which included myself). I was incredibly pleased to hear from one
of the sales team that several Our Price record stores had complained that the
booklets were regularly stolen. Not the CDs themselves; the booklets. I also
felt that heavy metal, and Sabbath in particular, were very misunderstood, and a
series of compilations CDs and videos featuring skulls, crosses and rosaries,
all of which looked more Remembrance Sunday than Prince Of Darkness, did little
to dispell that notion. It was important for me to package their compilations in
a way that a Joy Division fan might appreciate.
The first Sabbath albums I bought were scratchy, dusty LPs found in the basement
of the Camden Record & Tape Exchange, complete with their swirly inner bags, or
images of space ships on their Vertigo labels. Those re-issues I worked on back
in 1995 are what many kids, in Europe and Japan, at least, are their first
experience of these important records, and I was proud to have been a small part
of that. |
