Best Metal Videos of All Time

Honourable Mention 10: Zero the Hero—Black Sabbath

Honourable mention 10: Zero the Hero—Black Sabbath. Score: 9 points;

Score justification: song 8 points -1 points for production values +2 points for sheer metalness = 9 points.

Are you fucking kidding me? This video looks hideous. And quite probably intentionally so.

And this isn’t even close to Black Sabbath’s best songs. It’s cited as the inspiration to the Guns N’ Roses hit¹ “Paradise City”. When Ian Gillan joined Black Sabbath to produce Born Again, one could say that Black Sabbath returned to the gutter. This is not a bad thing per se, as one learns to survive in the gutter, and become hardier. More importantly, though, I will argue that Born Again is the most metal metal album ever made².

Above Unleashed in the East? Above Reign in Blood? Above Operation Mindcrime? I didn’t say the best heavy metal album, but the most metal metal album. Most of what I’ll be telling is referenced in this interview with Ian Gillan on Youtube and the Wikipedia entry about Born Again. Now, to recap all the reasons why Born Again is the metal’s metal³:

• Born Again was recorded at (Virgin CEO and billionaire) Richard Branson’s Manor Studio, a studio inside a heritage house. Black Sabbath and crew were partying so hard inside that Ian Gillan had set up a marquee tent in the garden to get some sleep. One morning, the Black Sabbath crew—including those specialising in pyrotechnics—decided to wake Gillan up by setting off explosives around his tent. The marquee tent ‘just took off, with a mushroom cloud like an atom bomb’ and the expensive tropical fish in the nearby pond all came floating to the top. Metal!🤘

• “Disturbing the Priest” was written after noise—caused by the above-mentioned explosion—complaints from the resident priest of the nearby church⁴. They needed—don’t ask why—a certain sound effect involving a big bucket of water and an anvil and then hit this contraption and lower and/or lift at different heights to hit it once more (again, don’t ask⁵). ‘It was a great effect, but it took hours to do.’ Suffer for your metal, indeed. Metal!🤘

• In order to amuse themselves, the four band members had bought race cars for racing on a go-cart track on the Manor’s property. Returning from a local pub, Ian Gillan took drummer Bill Ward’s car, drove the go-cart track, lost control and crashed it, escaping the car unscathed as it burst into flames, and the song “Thrashed” was born. Metal!🤘

• The album sounds muffled partly due to the fact that Ian Gillan inadvertently blew a couple of tweeters in the studio by playing the backing tracks too loud, yet nobody noticed. Metal!🤘

• The band had no input on the cover, which may very well be the worst metal atwork of all time. Bill Ward hated it. Ian Gillan told the press he vomited when he first saw it. Black Sabbath’s manager Don Arden—who hated ex-Sabbath singer Ozzy Osbourne for marrying his daughter Sharon—was fond of telling Osbourne that his children resembled the Born Again cover. Metal!🤘

• The Stonehenge replica used for live perfomances: on Spinal Tap they mixed up the metric and imperial measurements, and the replica was tabletop small. In reality, Black Sabbath—or someone in their management—sent the measurements of the replica in foots to the production company, who thought  they meant metres, meaning the set was more than 3 x bigger than intended. It was so big it could only fit in the largest venues, meaning Black Sabbath would only use it a few times during the whole Born Again tour. Metal!🤘

• During that live tour, over the sound of a crying baby, a dwarf dressed up to look like the deformed devil baby of the cover jumped down from the top of the Stonehenge set (on a few layers of mattresses) in the intro to the show. Metal!🤘

• Because Gillan had trouble recalling the Black Sabbath lyrics that Ozzy originally sang (“There’s no storyline. I can’t relate to what they mean.”), he had a cue book with plastified lyrics pages that he could turn on with his feet. Yet he couldn’t read those because of the mist coming of six buckets of dry ice⁶. Metal!🤘

• Because the Gillan-Iommi-Butler-Ward collaboration was originally intended as a new supergroup—which didn’t happen because the management decided it should be the next Black Sabbath incarnation—Iommi felt sorry that Gillan couldn’t sing some of his old songs, so they decided to play “Smoke on the Water” as the encore. Not metal;😇

• Eight out of nine—which totals 9 out of 10 after this—ain’t bad, because a perfect ten would not be true metal⁷. Metal!🤘

To recap: Born Again is so metal that without it, Spinal Tap wouldn’t have happened. For better or worse, Born Again is undisputedly the album infused with the most intense metal spirit, inside and out. No other album—despite intense⁸ efforts⁹—comes even close.

And this after the (relatively) normal years with Dio? You’d almost think that after Ozzy left, Black Sabbath became sane. Anybody thinking Ozzy Osbourne was the wildest member of Black Sabbath better think again.

I’m not sure if all of this is exactly good PR for metal. Metal doesn’t care. Metal follows P.T. Barnum’s adage ‘all publicity is good publicity¹⁰’. And while a philosopher like Nietzsche wonders “if you gaze into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back¹¹”, metal actually jumps right into that abyss to see what it’s like. And returns from it stronger than ever.

Don’t say: Ozzy Osbourne should have joined Deep Purple and made them play “Paranoid” live.

Do say: Black Sabbath should have made a video¹² of “Disturbing the Priest¹³” inside a church, including anvils dropped from several heights¹⁴ into baths of blood¹⁵.

🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘🤘

1. So it has that against it;

2. Ozzy called it “best thing I’ve heared from Sabbath since the original group broke up” (translation: Ozzy doesn’t like Dio…;-);

3. Despite Lars Ulrich calling it one of the best Black Sabbath albums;

4. Of course. Where else?

5. True metal never asks. Real metal acts first, then thinks later;

6. Cue to ‘original interpretations of classic lyrics’;

7. In metal, something always goes wrong, except for when it’s meant to go wrong;

8. In 1978, at Queen’s Jazz launch party in New Orleans’s Fairmont Hotel, Freddie Mercury organised nude waiters and waitresses, a fellow biting heads of live chickens, naked models wrestling in a liver pit and dwarfs swanning about with trays of cocaine strapped to their heads (if it wasn’t for the actual music and title—we can’t name an album called “Jazz” the best metal effort, can we?—it would’ve been a contender);

9. Manowar’s Death to False Metal compilation;

10. See: Ozzy biting off a dove’s head and a bat’s head;

11. Actual quote: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”;

12. Although this unofficial mix-up isn’t bad;

13. Best song of Born Again;

14. For the sound effect, of course;

15. It would have been the ultimate metal moment;

Author’s note: one more honourable mention to come. You read that right: metal, of course, deserves ELEVEN honourable mentions (while I will really limit the top ten to ten, and let you nominate number 11, if you dare…;-)