Three months after the release of their debut album, Black Sabbath travelled to Hilversum in the Netherlands to film a session for the short-lived Dutch TV show Doebidoe.
Broadcast on Nederland 1 – the oldest TV channel in the country – Doebidoe was the predecessor of the long-running Top Pop and featured live performances from the likes of David Bowie (who performed Space Oddity in 1969), Deep Purple and local heroes Golden Earring, who appeared on the show several times.
The Sabbath session found the band in peak form. They played a 40-minute set, performing blistering, often extended versions of songs from their debut album, including a version of The Wizard featuring different lyrics to the original and a rare live version of Warning. They also mimed a performance of Evil Woman for the broadcast.
Now, the full, broadcast-quality audio from the live tracks – long thought to have been lost – has surfaced. Previously, only a 20-second live clip that surfaced on YouTube in 2013, showing Sabbath performing N.I.B. on Doebidoe (without audio), was evidence that any record of the session had survived, and broadcaster AVRO had claimed the tapes were destroyed in a fire.
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The audio appears on an unofficial live album, The Lost 1970 Avro Sessions, released on the mysterious German label Avertigro, named in tribute to the band's record label, Vertigo, and AVRO. The album is available (should any copies remain) as a limited edition of 666 copies.
Thankfully for Sabbath fans, the audio is also on YouTube (embedded below) and on the Internet Archive, but it's so good it deserves a full release. It's what Record Store Day was built for.
Three days after filming their session for Doebidoe, Black Sabbath appeared on the German TV show Beat-Club, playing Black Sabbath, Iron Man and N.I.B., as well as a soundcheck cover of Carl Perkins' Blue Suede Shoes. The N.I.B. footage was finally released on Beat-Club's YouTube channel earlier this year.
