Sabotage

Sabotage is the sixth studio album by English rock band Black Sabbath, released in July 1975. It was recorded in the midst of litigation with their former manager Patrick Meehan. The stress that resulted from the band’s ongoing legal woes infiltrated the recording process, inspiring the album’s title. It was co-produced by guitarist Tony Iommi and Mike Butcher.

Black Sabbath began work on their sixth album in February 1975, again in England at Morgan Studios in Willesden, London. The title Sabotage was chosen because the band were at the time being sued by their former management and felt they were being ”sabotaged all the way along the line and getting punched from all sides”, according to Iommi.”It was probably the only album ever made with lawyers in the studio,” said drummer Bill Ward.Iommi credits those legal troubles for the album’s angry, heavier sound.
In 2001, bassist Geezer Butler explained to Dan Epstein, ”Around the time of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, we found out that we were being ripped off by our management and our record company. So, much of the time, when we weren’t onstage or in the studio, we were in lawyer’s offices trying to get out of all our contracts. We were literally in the studio, trying to record, and we’d be signing all these affidavits and everything. That’s why it’s called Sabotage – because we felt that the whole process was just being totally sabotaged by all these people ripping us off.” In his autobiography I Am Ozzy, singer Ozzy Osbourne confirms that ”writs were being delivered to us at the mixing desk” and that Ward ”was manning the phones”. In the liner notes to the 1998 live album Reunion, Butler claimed the band suffered through 10 months of legal cases and admitted, ”Music became irrelevant to me. It was a relief just to write a song.”
Iommi later reflected, ”We could’ve continued and gone on and on, getting more technical, using orchestras and everything else which we didn’t particularly want to. We took a look at ourselves, and we wanted to do a rock album – Sabbath Bloody Sabbath wasn’t a rock album, really.”According to the book How Black Was Our Sabbath, ”The recording sessions would usually carry on into the middle of the night. Tony Iommi was working really hard on the production side of things with the band’s co-producer Mike Butcher, and he was spending a lot of time working out his guitar sounds. Bill, too, was experimenting with the drums, especially favouring the ’backwards cymbal’ effect.” Osbourne, however, grew frustrated with how long Black Sabbath albums were taking to record, writing in his autobiography, ”Sabotage took about four thousand years.”
According to Iommi, the Sabotage sessions were the scene of a legendary jam session between Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin.[4] Iommi’s recollection may be inaccurate, however, as records show that Zeppelin were on tour in the US at the time Sabotage was being recorded. Ward’s recollection of the exact timing of the Zeppelin jam session is also fuzzy. ”I don’t even know what album we were working on”, the drummer explained. ”But one of John (Bonham)’s favourite songs was ’Supernaut’ – so, when they came down to the studio, he wanted to jam ’Supernaut’.”

Sabotage’s front cover art has garnered mixed reactions over the years and is regarded by some as one of the worst album covers in rock history.[10] The inverted mirror concept was conceived by Graham Wright, Bill Ward’s drum tech, who was also a graphic artist.[11] The band attended what they believed was a test photo shoot for the album cover, thus explaining their choice of clothing. Said Ward, ”The only thing we didn’t discuss was what we’d all wear on the day of the shot. Since that shoot day, the band has survived through a tirade of clothing comments and jokes that continue to this day”. Ward, in fact, was wearing his wife’s red tights in the photo.[1] Wright recalls in the book How Black Was Our Sabbath that the plan was for each band member to appear on the cover dressed in black and had been instructed to bring some stage clothes for preliminary photos, but when they arrived no black costumes had been laid out by the designers and ”the original concept had been overruled.” The designers ”carried on with the shoot, explaining they would superimpose the images at a later stage and that it would look great, honest. The session was unbelievably rushed, and the outcome was far from what had been originally envisaged ... Ironically, the sleeve design that was intended to illustrate the idea of sabotage had instead become a victim of sabotage itself. By the time they saw it, it was too late to change.”

Black Sabbath

1975

43:44

075992728720

Canada

CD

N/A

Doom Metal

CD 2822

nostar

Morgan Studios, London; Brussels

8

Album

N/A

1

2018-06-28 16:31:31

Jewel Case

~$12.95

2026-03-07

2018-06-28 16:31:31