“They said, ‘You're playing heavy metal.’ I said, ‘Heavy metal… what's that?’” Why Tony Iommi shunned the heavy metal tag during Black Sabbath's early days

Tony Iommi: The Godfather of Heavy Metal, Volume One - YouTube

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Tony Iommi may now be known as the Godfather of Heavy Metal, but he has admitted that he wasn’t keen on Black Sabbath being labeled “heavy metal” – especially in the band's earlier days – as he and the rest of the members weren't interested in being pigeonholed.

“The first album cover was a woman on the front with a black cloak on, and inside the cover was an inverted cross,” he tells Gibson TV, referring to the now-iconic album cover of the band's self-titled debut, featuring a figure – portrayed by model Louisa Livingstone – dressed in a black cloak, standing in front of the Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire, England.

“So that, as you can imagine, opened a complete can of worms in 1969. That was basically a lot of the record company because of the imagery they put out, because nobody really had seen us. And then, of course, they'd see us, and because of what we played, it was scary music to them, which was really what we were trying to create.

“In those days, Geezer [Butler] and myself used to go and watch a lot of horror movies, and we loved them. And I thought it'd be great to have music like this – [to] create the same vibe as a horror film would do – and that was sort of what we did.”

The album's imagery ended up attracting a subset of people Iommi claimed he wasn't expecting to show up to their gigs. “Suddenly we had all these crazy people turning up at shows,” he said in a 2013 MOJO interview. “I think Alex Sanders [occultist and High Priest in the modern Pagan religion of Wicca] turned up at a gig once. It was all quite strange, really.”

But it was only when the band returned from an American run that Iommi first encountered the genre title that would define his musical legacy.

“I got back from America, and I've done an interview at my home with Melody Maker,” he told Gibson TV. “They said, ‘Oh, you know you're playing heavy metal.’ ‘Heavy Metal. What's that?’ ‘That's what you're playing.’ And I went, ‘No, we're heavy rock.’ He went, ‘No, no, you're heavy metal.’

“I said, ‘Well, we call it heavy rock. You call it heavy metal. Call it what you like, but we're heavy rock.’ And I wouldn't accept the heavy metal thing for years.”

The band took issue with being typecast. As Geezer Butler extrapolates in a 2018 BBC interview, “At first, we didn’t like being called heavy metal. But everyone likes to put you into certain pigeonholes, so we sort of got used to it. And then instead of it being derogatory, it became a whole lifestyle.”

Elsewhere in the same Gibson TV interview, the Iommi looked back at the birth of Black Sabbath – and their “horrible” first jam.