A NATIONAL ACROBAT
- "...was just me thinking about who selects what sperm gets through to the egg." - Geezer
AFTER ALL (THE DEAD)
This song deals with the life after death.
Is there a hell?
Is there a heaven?
What happens to your soul?
It's about communicating with the afterlife.
AFTER FOREVER
The bands personal statement towards god. Funny enough the band
was blamed for blasphemy because that one. It's a pro christian
song.
Perhaps.
ALL MOVING PARTS (STAND STILL)
a fantasy about female transvestite (a woman
who dresses up like a man) becoming President of the United States. And she's
into kinky sex.
AM I GOING INSANE (RADIO)
Ozzy said that Geezer was rhyming radio rental with mental so they started using the phrase radio
when meaning mental.
Radio rental rhymes with mental. Hence "Am I Going Insane (radio)" means
"Am I Going Insane (mental)".
Tony Martin "Anno Mundi" difficult one this,
I know what I meant it to be about when I wrote it, but
unless I go through each line, It won't make a great impact.
In the year of the world, people are all trying to
save the planet, or they SAY they are trying to save the planet,
but really it's just talk and everything carries on the
same until the world destructs. Almost every line is a
question, to which there is an answer, but like a questionair,
everybody's answer will be different. I will run through the
song one day and point out what each line means.
BACK TO EDEN
Is it to idealistic to hope that we can return a simpler, more
altruistic time when peace was the norm?
BEHIND THE WALL OF SLEEP
"....It's about death!
I always thought that your dreams were telling you what death
was going to be like, after a particularly weird dream I had." - Geezer
BLACK SABBATH
- a warning against dabbling in the occult, inspired by Geezer's frightening experiences.
BURIED ALIVE
A guy is told everything. He is told what to do and what not to do.
So he screams for help. The world becomes a coffin to him who is
to be closed soon.
Another take is it is like the Poe story, self explainatory as the title says.
CARDINAL SIN
There are those religious leaders who preach one thing whilst
practising another.
CHILDREN OF THE GRAVE/THE HAUNTING
What happens to the children when the parents don't change their way of life?
Or it is a warning about holocaust, the end of life after atomic war, sequel to Electric Funeral.
"That's a happy song! My interpretation of that is that, in every generation,
there's a new revolution. Every generation hates something about the current generation.
It was our punk song, if you like." - Ozzy
CHILDREN OF THE SEA
Children of the Sea - there has been a lot of speculation that it is about
Atlantis, but Dio has only spoke of it as a song about "ecological awareness".
COMPUTER GOD
The world is ruled by computers. The Computer becomes god and
names become numbers. Humanity becomes computerized.
CORNUCOPIA
Cornucopia comes from Latin ('cornu copiae') and means same as
'Fullhorn' (u with dots) in German. Cornucopia is of course a symbol -
metaphor of wealth and fertility. The name is more than sufficient
since the song criticizes the so called modern prosperity.
Geezer wrote it after he heard on the radio that "only" 25 men had
been killed in Viet Nam that week.
CROSS OF THORNS
The anger and frustration felt in Ireland by the young people under
the pressure of religious intolerance.
DIRTY WOMEN
The never ending hunger for sex.
"Technical Ectasy" was said to be recorded near a brothel.
"We were in Miami and on the way to the studio,
we had to pass all these hookers and there were all
these dirty old men every night, hiding in alleyways..." - Geezer
"That was me!" - Ozzy
DISTURBING THE PRIEST
The idea to that title came up during the recordings of "BORN AGAIN"
while SABBATH were rehearsing in an 'abandoned' church. Every day
a parson came up and complaints about the loud music which disturbs
him.
DYING FOR LOVE
The pain felt by ordinary people in war-torn Yugoslavia.
ELECTRIC FUNERAL
- "It's about nuclear war. That's it really." - Geezer
EVIL EYE
In today's society, nobody is safe from unwelcome intrusion into
their private lives.
FAIRIES WEAR BOOTS
A song that was written after BLACK SABBATH had been kicked off by a group of skinheads.
"It's about skinheads." - Ozzy
"We were in constant battles with them, so we wrote the song,
calling them 'fairies'." - Geezer
HEADLESS CROSS
A true story that happened in the Middle Ages while the pestilence
was going through europe. A small village called "Headles Cross"
also was amazed with that illness. Having no idea of what to do
against it the people only went to the hill of the headless cross
where they prayed to god for help. No one survived.
Also see "THE HEADLESS CROSS" story.
INTO THE VOID
1.About the environment which is more and more destroyed by the modern society.
2.Man blasts off into space to escape the wickedness and environmental destruction on earth.
IRON MAN
A man makes a time travel into the future of the world. He sees
the apocalypse. When he comes back he tries to warn the world but
nobody takes care of him. So he gets mad and has revenge on mankind.
In the end it becomes clear that he is the reason for the apocalypse.
"Ozzy came up with the title 'Iron Man' and I wrote it about this
guy who's blasted off into space and he sees the future of the world, which
isn't very good. Then he goes through a magnetic storm on the way back and
is turned to iron. He's trying to warn everyone about the future of the
world, but he can't speak, so everyone is taking the mickey out of him all
the time, and he just doesn't care in the end." - Geezer
The Iron Man's destruction of the people who ignore and mock him unwittingly
fulfills his own vision.
JUNIOR'S EYES
Ozzy rewrote the lyrics to make the song about his relationship
with his recently deceased father.
LETTERS FROM EARTH
This songs is inspired by many letters BLACK SABBATH
received. Letters from people who are in prison, who live in
the real world. It's for ordinary people so they can see that
BLACK SABBATH understand their problems.
ORCHID / LORD OF THIS WORLD
about the wicked people of the world who allow Satan to become master of the earth.
The verses are from Satan's perspective.
"It's actually called 'Awkward' - it's a song about Bill!" - Ozzy
"That was our one and only Satan song, it's about Old Nick." - Geezer
MASTER OF INSANITY
The song is about what we as human beings are doing to the rest
of humanity and what we are doing to our planet. All the problems
that no one seems to want to address - Aids, overpopulation, acid
rain, people living on the streets - are represented in Master Of
Insanity. The way to defeat it is by reaching out to other people
and doing something for the world around you.
NEVER SAY DIE
Bill recalls that the song and album title were chosen to sum up the past ten years of the band.
N.I.B.
Thought to have stood for Nativity In Black or Name In Blood, the title was
a nickname, Ozzy and Tony explain:
The devil falls in love with a mortal woman and becomes a good person.
The title has nothing to do with the content of the song.
"The irony about 'N.I.B.' is that everyone thinks it means 'Nativity In Black' and it doesn't.
We were all stoned in Hamburg and Bill used to have this really long, pointy beard and
I said, 'Hey, Bill, you look like a pen nib!' So when Geezer said,
'What we going to call this new song?', I said, 'Oh, call it 'N.I.B'" - Ozzy
"And we used to call Bill 'Nib' all the time then - Nibby Ward!" - Tony
PARANOID
"I remember [producer] Roger Bain saying, 'We need three or four
minutes to finish the album' so Tony came up with the riff, I came up with the
melody, Geezer wrote the lyrics and it was done within ten minutes." - Ozzy
Geezer didn't even know what the word "paranoid" meant at the time, but people
were always calling him that so he made it the title of the song.
PSYCHOPHOBIA
Extreme cults can easily influence and mislead impressionable kids
in todays society. It's about the David Koresh cult in Waco, Texas.
ROCK'N'ROLL DOCTOR
A psychiatrist who heals the people with the help of Rock'n'Roll
music. on the surface it's about the power of rock music to cure
people, but it was actually written as a tribute to the band's cocaine
dealer!
SINS OF THE FATHER
A child who loves his father more than evrything else.
Sadly enough, his father has done many mistakes. But the child
has to learn to live alone, to be hisself and to walk out of the
shadow of his father. Be your own person, fly with your own wings!
SPIRAL ARCHITECT
"was about life's experiences being added to a person's DNA to create a unique individual". - Geezer
SUPERNAUT
A. Mankinds great dream to reach one day the stars.
B. Describing the feeling when high on cocaine.
SWEET LEAF
A tribute to pot, even though the title came from cigarettes.
"We were in Island Studios. I'd just come back from Dublin and
I had these Sweet Afton cigarettes you can only get in Ireland and it had on them,
'It's the sweetest leaf that gives you the taste.' Ozzy said,
'What can we write this one about?' and I just looked at it and went, 'Sweet leaf- yeah!'" - Geezer
SWINGING THE CHAIN
A song that seems to anticipate the breakup of the band, possibly written before Ozzy returned.
THE HAND THAT ROCKS THE CRADLE
The horrific story of nurse Beverly Allit, responsible for the
deaths of number of children.
THE SEVENTH STAR
An old idea how the world goes on. Things comes and things go, it's
an never ending turning circle. The SEVENTH STAR marks the seventh
coming or going of the world!
THE WRIT
The angry lyrics are directed at the band's previous management
which had ripped them off financially - legend has it that Ozzy was personally
handed a writ on stage / in studio.
TIME MACHINE
Don't only do what other people tell you. Make your own decisions
and attitudes. You only have to dream a little bit more.
TOO LATE
A guy who has made a pact with the devil. He is able to get
everything he wants. But in the end he has to pay. He tries to
escape that curse, but it's too late.
TRASHED
The text is written by Ian Gillan and describes his experience
with an accident he had with a car during the recording of
"BORN AGAIN". He was drunken. See Brands Hatch
A song about TV preachers who take as much money as possible
from the people. Televangelist, a "give-me-eight-million-dollars-
or-I'm-gonna-die" track. It's a crime. VIRTUAL DEATH
If you're not careful, you can get lost in a confused state of mind. WAR PIGS
The politicians who send their innocent citizens into the wars.
"Originally, it was called 'Walpurgis', about Satan's Christmas thing,
but we had to change the lyrics, because all the Satan stuff was going on." - Geezer
"It was about Vietnam. We knew nothing about Vietnam, it's just an anti-war song." - Ozzy
"It's about the sad shape that our world is in." (Ronnie James Dio, 1992). ZERO THE HERO