Quotes About Music

Officially, we didn't have a band leader. Unofficially, we all knew it was Tony [Iommi].

There was a cinema called The Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways , and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. 'Isn't it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?' I remember Tony [Iommi] saying one day. 'Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.'

At the court hearing, Howard Weitzman told the judge that if they were gonna ban 'Suicide Solution' and hold me responsible for some poor kid shooting himself, then they'd have to ban Shakespeare, 'cos Romeo and Juliet's about suicide, too.

I don't think we [ Black Sabbath ] ever got a good review for anything we did. Which is why I never bother with reviews.

Apart from Tony Iommi – who I'd never seen again since leaving school – I didn't even know anyone who could play a musical instrument. So, instead, I decided to grow my hair long and get some tattoos. At least I'd look the part. The hair was easy. The tattoos stung like a f**king bastard.

Today you hear people saying that we invented heavy metal with the song 'Black Sabbath' . But I've always had a bee up my arse about the term 'heavy metal'. To me, it doesn't say anything musically, especially now that you've got seventies heavy metal , eighties heavy metal , nineties heavy metal and new - millennium heavy metal – which are all completely different, even though people talk about them like they're all the same.

As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.

I'd always wanted to play an instrument myself, but my folks didn't have the dough to buy me one, and I didn't have the patience to learn anyway. My attention span was five seconds.

We'd recorded Black Sabbath in one day. Sabotage took about four thousand years.

Bands like The Move , Traffic and The Moody Blues were proving that you didn't have to be from Liverpool to be successful.

The music business is like any other business, y'know? When sales are going well, everything's hunky-f**king-dory. But the second something goes wrong, it's all blood and law-suits.

If you don't have a sense of humour when you're in a band, you end up like f**king Emerson, Lake and Palmer, making eight-disc LPs so you can all have your own three-hour f**king solos. And who wants to listen to that bollocks?

Taking five or ten or fifteen years to make an album, like Guns N' Roses did, is just f**king ridiculous, end of story. By that time, your career's died, been resurrected, and then died again.

My last good memory of the eighties, before everything went dark, was being sent to Wormwood Scrubs. Not because I'd broken the law again – amazingly – but because I was asked to play a gig there.

I'd been on the road for twenty-five years, pretty much. I was like a mouse on a wheel: album, tour, album, tour, album, tour, album, tour.

After a real snake ended up on stage one night, it was well and truly pissed off about being on stage with Ozzy Osbourne, that snake was.

Bartók. Blame it on Bartók. Or the bossanova.

I didn't know folk music growing up, no. It's something I've come to study, really, because I think there's so much to learn from traditional music in the sense of the way music began as a way of communication, the traveling storyteller, the bard, the minstrels.

I work on words, mostly, toward them being poetry or short stories, and then some of those become songs. They all find their place in the world, but they all start off in the same place. I'm always painting and drawing as well, and it's an ongoing creative assignment.

I work on words quite separately to music. They're both ongoing, and I don't ever feel like I'm working in a cycle in that respect, because it's every day anyway, no matter what I'm doing. Then I get to a point when I've collected together enough words that seem like they want to be songs rather than poems, or sometimes not.

Wagner drives the nail into your head with swinging hammer blows.

The art of interpretation is not to play what is written.

Music is the divine way to tell beautiful, poetic things to the heart..

Real understanding does not come from what we learn in books; it comes from what we learn from love of nature, of music, of man. For only what is learned in that way is truly understood.