Black Sabbath’s first major exposure came when the band appeared on John Peel’s Top Gear radio show in 1969, performing to a national audience in the UK, shortly before recording of their first album commenced. Although the ‘Evil Woman’ single failed to chart, the band were afforded two days of studio time in November to record their debut with producer Rodger Bain.
Black Sabbath was released on Friday the 13th February, 1970, and reached number 8 in the UK Albums Chart. Following its U.S. and Canadian release in May 1970 by Warner Bros. Records, the album reached number 23 on the Billboard 200, where it remained for over a year. The album was a commercial success but was widely panned by some critics such as Lester Bangs from Rolling Stone. The record is now generally accepted as the first heavy metal album.
The band returned to the studio in June 1970, just four months after Black Sabbath was released. The new album was initially set to be named War Pigs after the song which was critical of the Vietnam War; however, Warner changed the title to Paranoid. The album’s lead single, the title track, was written in the studio at the last minute. The single was released in September ‘70 and reached number four on the UK Singles Chart, remaining Black Sabbath’s only top ten hit ever.
In the wake of the recording of Sabbath’s second album, they were out on tour, before it was released, and on August 31, 1970, performed one of their finest shows of the era at the Montreux Casino in Switzerland. This is the venue which, a year later, during a performance there by Frank Zappa and The Mothers of Invention, burnt down (as epitomised in ‘Smoke On The Water’ by Deep Purple).
Sabbath’s gig at the venue was subject to no such misfortune however, instead the show was a dynamic concert which caused raptures through the audience and which remains a classic concert, still flagged by fans