Geezer Butler on the fractious early days of Black Sabbath

(Image credit: Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)

Before Black Sabbath were Black Sabbath, they were Earth, and before that, Ozzy Osbourne and bassist Geezer Butler were in a band together called Rare Breed without their future bandmates. Speaking to Metal Hammer, the bassist once recounted how Ozzy and Tony Iommi refused to work together. Looking back to their formation, Butler said it wasn’t Osbourne’s primal howl that originally attracted him to the singer – he was the fact he owned some essential equipment. “I saw this advert, ‘Ozzy Zig wants a Gig’ with the magic words: ‘has own PA’,” Butler recounted. “It didn’t matter what he sounded like. It had his address and I went down there, and the next day Tony [Iommi] and Bill Ward went round.”

But despite everything appearing to be in place for the quartet to start a band, conquer the world, change the shape of rock music, etc, this scenario played out just like those old Grolsch ads: 'schtop! It’sh not ready yet!' The problem was that Ozzy and Tony couldn’t stand the sight of one another. “Ozzy had been to school with Tony, and they hated each other,” Butler said. “Tony had bullied him at school, so it was me one day, Tony the next day, so Ozzy decided he’d go with me because he didn’t want to play with Tony. That’s how we started.”

Ozzy and Butler formed Rare Breed instead, but their new musical venture was brief. “We did two shows together in Rare Breed,” Butler continued. “Then I got fired from work and wanted to go into music full time, so we went round to Tony’s house to see if he knew any drummers. Bill was there at Tony’s house. He said, ‘I’ll join the band if Tony does’ and there we went, first as Earth, then as Sabbath.”

The lesson here, then, is to try and put any lingering resentment of people you didn’t like at school behind you, because you just don’t know which of your old playground enemies might be the one to help you change the face of music. Luckily, in the case of Black Sabbath, bridges were built, and the rest is history.

Niall Doherty is a writer and editor whose work can be found in Classic Rock, The Guardian, Music Week, FourFourTwo, Champions Journal, on Apple Music and more. Formerly the Deputy Editor of Q magazine, he co-runs the music Substack letter The New Cue with fellow former Q colleague Ted Kessler. He is also Reviews Editor at Record Collector. Over the years, he's interviewed some of the world's biggest stars, including Elton John, Coldplay, Radiohead, Liam and Noel Gallagher, Florence + The Machine, Arctic Monkeys, Muse, Pearl Jam, Depeche Mode, Robert Plant and more.