Black Sabbath

Pitch-black Playback of first album

Number 10, London Fields,

Hackney

By Paul Davies

The evening’s entertainment was presented as a ‘pitch-black playback’ of the debut album which alloyed together a brooding heavy sound and dark lyrics to create the Heavy Metal genre. Most heavy music lovers who know their sonic onions when asked chorus Black Sabbath’s debut album as the recording which created Heavy Metal.

Fifty years later, an invitation to attend a blindfolded playback to sense the full ambient weight and gravitas of this seminal waxing was an irresistible warning that the faithfully curious just couldn’t resist.

With the venue being named Number 10, the immediate assumption being a black door behind which the dark arts of politics and base greed is conjured by old school narcissists, when, in fact, the address was a hard to find bar cum cinema in darkest Hackney; the interior of which almost passed off as a Louisiana Honky Tonk. Witnessing the comical spectacle of a slapstick standoff argument between various parties emerging from an earlier listening who, threatening violence with chairs, chased each other out of the venue was proof enough that Sabbath’s first still gets the blood flowing and most definitely boiling over.

Inside the dark cocoon of the cinematic soundstage, eye mask firmly in place, the initial foreboding drone of the opening self-titled track enveloped the heightened senses and approximately thirty-eight minutes flowed by in an unusual dimension of sound and time not often experienced in normal everyday listening situations.

There isn’t the need to preach and explain to the already initiated Sabbath fan the basic ingredients of this Regent Sound recorded release. Yet, being transported to a higher inner realm under these listening conditions, with another fifty or so souls, was darkly transcendental. The only caveat being that the source recording came from the slightly strange Noughties remaster released on Sanctuary and not from the original Vertigo.

Nevertheless, what is this that sounds before me is the beginning of a brave new world that legendarily became known as Heavy Metal.

Back in the bar, with a Boozy Osborne to hand, the evening’s special cocktail re-engaged the hive mind back to reality with the foreboding knowledge that this landmark metal album still continues to menace and enthral in equal measures.