Black Sabbath

2003 Note: Having written my very first article for the Beatles Monthly I was asked by the publisher, Sean O’Mahoney (aka Johnny Dean), to contribute to another of his publications, Beat Instrumental. It was a great offer but I was living in a small Midlands town where the opportunities to interview the good and the great were rare. But on March 26th 1970, Black Sabbath, who had just released their first album, came to play at the school that was directly opposite my family home. At the time the music papers were drumming up publicity about them as "devil rockers" and they seemed to be symptomatic of the loss of hope in the '60s dream of "love and peace" and also of the fall-out of the drug culture. My interview with Black Sabbath was the first I’d ever conducted. I took notes as I had no tape recorder and can remember standing with them in the school cloakroom as they got ready to go on stage. I wrote up the short piece a week later and sent it to Beat Instrumental but it was never used. A year later I became the Features Editor of the magazine.

*