When Roger Waters predicted that metal would disappear: “He utterly loathed what we’d done”
Some say heavy metal was born with the arrival of The Who’s ‘Boris the Spider’ in 1966, while others trace it back to The Kinks’ ‘You Really Got Me’. Wherever the first domino fell, most of us can agree that the genre truly arrived in 1970, thanks to Black Sabbath’s debut album. The band’s sound was dark, psychotic, provocative and not at all to the taste of Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters.
The psychedelic rock wave to which Pink Floyd was a party, especially under the early leadership of Syd Barrett, was hugely influential for the subsequent metal wave. Jimi Hendrix’s effects-ridden guitar and destructive onstage persona undoubtedly catalysed the storm, but Pink Floyd was cut from a different cloth.
If Led Zeppelin represented the heavier side of the prog-rock spectrum, Pink Floyd pandered to more delicate, introspective sensibilities. However, heavy songs like ‘The Nile Song’ and, several years later, ‘Young Lust’ suggested that Waters didn’t so much take issue with Black Sabbath’s heavy instrumentals as their antichrist visage and lyrical themes.
Speaking to Louder Sound in 2020, drummer Bill Ward acknowledged that Sabbath’s lyrics are what made them unique. “What set us apart from everyone else were our lyrics,” he said. “There were a lot of great bands at the time – Zeppelin, Deep Purple, for instance – but none had those morbid lyrics like us. It’s what defined the band, made us unique.”
Bassist Geezer Butler remembered Waters’ reaction to the 1970 debut album elsewhere in the same interview feature. “I read at the time about Roger Waters from Pink Floyd’s attitude,” he recalled. “He utterly loathed what we’d done. He thought the album was total crap.”
Presumably, Waters was somewhat peeved that Sabbath had lured young listeners in a different direction, but he predicted the fad wouldn’t last very long. “[He] predicted that both it and us would quickly disappear,” Butler continued. “I must admit that made me laugh at the time – and still does.”
As we know, Black Sabbath went on to release their seminal second album, Paranoid, in September 1970, setting a precedent for a successful run of albums through the early 1970s. Although the band’s most influential material arrived early in the decade, they became increasingly experimental over time, contributing handsomely to the ongoing evolution of the genre they helped define.
Today, heavy metal sits above countless subgenres, from speed metal and thrash metal to death metal and nu-metal. You would be hard-pressed to find a modern band under any of these tags that wouldn’t cite Black Sabbath as a guiding influence.
Listen to ‘Black Sabbath’, the first song from Black Sabbath’s self-titled debut album, below. The song is widely considered the first ever of the doom-metal subgenre.