Black Sabbath "Born Again"

Born Again is the eleventh studio album by English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, released in August 1983. It is the only album the group recorded with lead vocalist Ian Gillan, best known for his work with Deep Purple. It was also the last Black Sabbath album for nine years to feature original bassist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward, until he played the studio tracks on their 1998 live album Reunion. The album has received mixed to negative reviews from critics, but it was a commercial success upon its 1983 release, reaching No. 4 in the UK charts. The album also hit the top 40 in the United States.

Following the departure of vocalist Ronnie James Dio and drummer Vinny Appice in 1982, Black Sabbath's future was very much in doubt. The band switched management to Don Arden (Sharon Osbourne's father) and it was he who suggested Ian Gillan as the band's new vocalist. "That band was put together on paper," guitarist Tony Iommi revealed in the 1992 documentary Black Sabbath: 1978–1992. "We'd never rehearsed." Initially, the project which became Born Again was intended to be a new supergroup; they did not intend to bill themselves as Black Sabbath but Arden insisted on the group using the recognisable Black Sabbath name. The band considered many possible vocalists such as Robert Plant and David Coverdale before settling on Gillan. The band even received an audition tape from a then-unknown Michael Bolton. Iommi told Hit Parader magazine in 1983 that Gillan was the best available candidate, saying "His shriek is legendary." Gillan was at first reluctant to work on the project, but his manager later convinced him to meet with Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler at The Bear public house in Oxford and, after a night of heavy drinking, Gillan officially committed to the project in February 1983. 

The project was originally intended to be a new supergroup, and the members of the group had no intention of billing themselves as Black Sabbath. At some point after recording had been completed, Arden insisted that they use the recognizable Sabbath name, and the members were overruled. "We thought we were doing a kind of Gillan-Iommi-Butler-Ward album…" recalled bassist Geezer Butler. "That is the way we approached the album. When we had finished the album, we took it to the record company and they said, 'Well, here's the contract: it is going to go out as a Black Sabbath album."

Born Again also featured the return of founding member Bill Ward on drums, who had left the band in 1980 and was now newly sober. Ward has said that he enjoyed making the album.

Black Sabbath began recording the album in May 1983 at The Manor Studio owned by Richard Branson in the Oxfordshire countryside. Producer Robin Black had previously worked with the band in the mid-1970s, serving as engineer for the album Sabotage. In his autobiography, Iommi recounts his surprise when Gillan informed him that during the sessions he planned to live outside the house in a marquee tent. "I thought he was joking, but when I arrived at the Manor I saw this marquee outside and I thought, fucking hell, he's serious. Ian had put up this big, huge tent. It had a cooking area and a bedroom and whatever else." Gillan brought an immediacy to the songwriting process that was uncommon for Sabbath. "Ian's lyrics were about sexual things or true facts, even about stuff that happened at The Manor there and then," Iommi recalls in his memoir. "They were good, but quite a departure from Geezer's and Ronnie's lyrics." For example, Gillan returned from a local pub one evening, took a car belonging to drummer Ward, and commenced racing around a go-cart track located on the Manor Studio property. He crashed the car, which burst into flames after he escaped uninjured. He wrote the album's opening track "Trashed" about the experience. In addition, the song "Disturbing the Priest" was written after a rehearsal space set up by Iommi in a small building near a local church received noise complaints from the resident priests.

Although the band got along well, it became apparent to all involved that Gillan's style did not quite mesh with the Sabbath sound. In 1992, Gillan told director Martin Baker, "I was the worst singer Black Sabbath ever had. It was totally, totally incompatible with any music they'd ever done. I didn't wear leathers, I wasn't of that image...I think the fans probably were in a total state of confusion." In 1992, Iommi admitted to Guitar World, "Ian is a great singer, but he's from a completely different background, and it was difficult for him to come in and sing Sabbath material." When the band heard the final product they were horrified at the muffled sound of the mix. In his autobiography, Iommi explains that Gillan inadvertently blew a couple of tweeters in the studio speakers by playing the backing tracks too loud and nobody noticed. "We just thought it was a bit of a funny sound, but it went very wrong somewhere between the mix and the mastering and the pressing of that album...the sound was really dull and muffly. I didn't know about it, because we were already out on tour in Europe. By the time we heard the album, it was out and in the charts, but the sound was awful." For all his misgivings, Gillan remembers the period fondly, stating in the Black Sabbath: 1978–1992 documentary, "But by God, we had a good year...And the songs, I think, were quite good."

The album's cover was produced cursorily by Steve 'Krusher' Joule, based on a black-and-white photocopy of a baby photo published in a 1968 magazine. Martin Popoff described the creature on the cover as a "garish red devil-baby". Bill Ward has said that he personally hated the album's cover and according to him, Ian Gillan told the press that he vomited when he first saw it. However, Tony Iommi approved the album cover, which has been considered one of the worst ever. Ben Mitchell of Blender called the cover "awful". The British magazine, Kerrang!, ranked the cover in second place, behind only the Scorpions' Lovedrive, on their list of "10 Worst Album Sleeves in Metal/Hard Rock". The list was based on votes from the magazine's readers. NME included the sleeve on their list of the "29 sickest album covers ever". Black Sabbath's manager, Don Arden, was quite hostile towards the band's ex-vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, who had recently married his daughter Sharon, and he was fond of telling Osbourne that his children resembled the Born Again album cover.

Following the tour supporting Born Again, this version of Black Sabbath fell apart, with Gillan and touring drummer Bev Bevan departing. The tour was also a breaking point for Butler, who admits in the Black Sabbath: 1978–1992 documentary, "I just got totally disillusioned with the whole thing and I left some time in 1984 after the Born Again tour. I just had enough of it." In 2015 Butler clarified to Dave Everley of Classic Rock: "I left because my second child was born and he was having problems, so I wanted to stay with him. I told Tony I couldn't concentrate on the band anymore. But I never fell out with anybody." Butler says the looming Deep Purple reunion played a large role in Gillan's decision to leave. Disagreements with management also contributed to the band's dissolution. Bevan would briefly return to the Sabbath fold in 1986-87 to record cymbal overdubs for the album The Eternal Idol.

According to Iommi's autobiography, Ward began drinking again near the end of the Born Again recording sessions and returned to Los Angeles for treatment. The band recruited Bev Bevan, who had played with The Move and ELO, for the upcoming tour in support of the new album. Gillan had all the lyrics to the Sabbath songs written out and plastered all over the stage, explaining to Martin Baker in 1992, "I couldn't get into my brain any of these lyrics...I cannot soak in these words. There's no storyline. I can't relate to what they mean." Gillan attempted to overcome the problem by having a cue book with plastic pages on stage, which he would turn with his foot during the show. However, Gillan did not anticipate the "six buckets" of dry ice that engulfed the stage, making it impossible for the singer to see the lyric sheets. "Ian wasn't very sure-footed either," Iommi writes in his memoir. "He once fell over my pedal board. He was waving at the people, stepped back and, bang!, he went arse over head big time." Gillan also told Birch that it was Don Arden's idea to open the show with a crying baby blaring over the speakers and a dwarf made to look exactly like the demonic baby depicted on the Born Again album cover miming to the screaming. "We noticed a dwarf walking around the day before the opening show...And we're saying to Don, 'We think this is in the worst possible taste, this dwarf, you know?' And Don's going, 'Nah, the kids will love it, it'll be great.'"

The tour is most infamous, however, for the gigantic Stonehenge props the band used. Iommi recalls in his autobiography that it was Butler's idea but the designers took his measurements the wrong way and thought it was meant to be life-size. Months later, while rehearsing for the tour at the Birmingham NEC, the stage set arrived. "We were in shock," writes Iommi. "This stuff was coming in and in and in. It had all these huge columns in the back that were as wide as your average bedroom, the columns in front were about 13 feet high, and we had all the monitors and the side fills as well as all this rock. It was made of fiberglass and wood, and bloody heavy." The set would be lampooned in Rob Reiner's 1984 rock music mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap, with the band having the opposite problem of having to use miniature Stonehenge stage props. Butler has said that he told the associate scriptwriter of the film the story of the band's performances with their "Stonehenge" stage props. In an interview for the documentary Black Sabbath: 1978–1992, Gillan claims Don Arden had the dwarf walk across the top of the Stonehenge props at the start of the show and, as the tape of the screaming baby faded away, fall back "from about thirty-five feet in the air on this big pile of mattresses. And then, 'Dong!' The bells start and the monks come out, the whole thing. Pure Spinal Tap." The band toured Europe first, playing the Reading Festival (a performance that is included on the 2011 deluxe edition of Born Again) and also playing in a bullring in Barcelona in September. Sabbath performed Gillan's hit with Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water", on the tour, with Iommi explaining in his memoir, "it seemed like a bum deal for him not to do any of his stuff while he was doing all of ours. I don't know if we played it properly but the audience loved it. The critics moaned; it was something out of the bag and they didn't want to know then." In October, the band took the Stonehenge set to America but could only use a portion of it at most gigs because the columns were too high. The set was eventually abandoned. A music video for "Zero the Hero" was also released, featuring performance footage of the band onstage interspersed with scenes involving several grotesque characters performing experiments on a witless young man in a haunted house filled with rats, roosters and a roaming horse.

Track listing

All songs credited to Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward, and Ian Gillan, except where noted.

Side one

1. "Trashed" 4:16
2. "Stonehenge" (Instrumental) 1:58
3. "Disturbing the Priest" 5:49
4. "The Dark" (Instrumental) 0:45
5. "Zero the Hero" 7:35

Side two

1. "Digital Bitch" 3:39
2. "Born Again" 6:34
3. "Hot Line" (Iommi/Butler/Gillan) 4:52
4. "Keep It Warm" (Iommi/Butler/Gillan) 5:36

Bill Ward left after the recording of this album to be replaced by Electric Light Orchestra's Bev Bevan.

According to legend, the infamous cover art for this album was done by an artist who was working for both Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne, and the story goes that he made an intentionally poor job of it in the hope that Sabbath would reject it so that he could sever ties with them. As it turned out, Tony Iommi loved it (although Ian Gillan thought it was appalling).

It is a common misconception that the "Stonehenge" scene in This Is Spinal Tap was inspired by Black Sabbath's stage set for this album's tour. Black Sabbath used a huge Stonehenge set that often didn't fit the venues they played in, whereas Spinal Tap's Stonehenge prop was too small, and "in danger of being crushed by a dwarf." In actuality the concept for this scene was developed in 1982, well before the Sabbath tour in question.

No CD version of this album was ever released in the United States (although some imports can be found in some stores in that country).

Recording information:

Recorded at The Manor Studio, Shipton on Cherwell, Oxfordshire. England.

Mastered on Amper Tapes.