super groovy delicious bite: paranoid

Black Sabbath looked into the abyss to satisfy their iron vengence and pacify the poison of porcine paranoia with the dark hand of doom. With the success of their eponymous debut the band went back into the studio only four months after it had been released. The sessions were produced by Rodger Bain with engineers Brian Humphries and Tom Allom at Regent Sound Studios and Island Studios in London with Tony Iommi on guitar and flute; Geezer Butler on bass guitar; Ozzy Osbourne on vocals; and Bill Ward on drums and congas; with Tom Allom adding piano on "Planet Caravan". The working title for the album was 'War Pigs'.

Iommi: “I think the reason this record turned out so well was that we had a long time to work out all the material. We were playing seven 45-minute sets each day in a dusty old club in Switzerland, in front of anywhere from three to two dozen people...Rehearsing like that for six weeks really tightened us up. It also enabled us to experiment more because we really only had enough songs for one set each day—certainly not seven. It gave us a chance to make stuff up and rearrange existing songs.”

Butler: "We literally went in and played as if it was a live gig. We didn't know anything about studios or production or engineering. We just went in, set up and played live in the studio and they recorded us. We did it all in less than a week. It sounds easy, but it's actually a really hard thing to do -- to record a band live in the studio and get the whole feeling across. A lot of producers tried that, but dismally failed. But Rodger and Tom just had the knack of doing it. And they'd just come up with a few suggestions here and there, and we'd do it...We really weren't doing anything back then besides sharing the occasional joint. We couldn't afford it. We couldn't even afford booze, so none of us were drinking yet. The music we were making was more a reflection of what we were thinking and experiencing at the time. We weren't into flower power and good vibes. That was crap to us, because from where we were, everything was bleak and dark...'Electric Funeral' was about the Cold War at the time. It was always touch and go whether Russia would drop the atomic bomb on us or we would drop the atomic bomb on them. So atomic war was always imminent, we thought. So we were as far removed from hippy flower power as you could get. We were four working class people in the most industrial part of England, and all we had to look forward to was dead-end jobs in factories. And we thought at any second we'd be called up to drop in to the Vietnam War, because it looked like Britain was going to get involved in it as well. So there wasn't much future in anything for us."

Osbourne: "I don't understand war. If you're on one side, and I'm on the other, and you get killed and I get killed, we've both lost. I'd have thought people would have learned, humanity would have learned. But I'm not turning into one of those fuckers, green people you know, going around Hyde Park, saying "Stop the War". That's not me...My job, if you can call it that, was to make kids have fun ... We were just four guys from Birmingham who couldn't even write our own names playing raw fucking music...I remember what a thrill it was to go from the back streets of Birmingham to Madison Square Garden in New York...it's like playing on Mars. You can't buy that."

'Paranoid' became the band's greatest success, going to number twelve in the US, five in Norway, two in Germany, and number one in the Netherlands and the UK. In the US, the album wasn't released until 1971, so as not to compete with the debut still on the charts.