Hole In The Sky

Hole In The Sky comes roaring out of the speakers like somebody kicked the studio door in, and that is exactly the way the Zoo Crew likes to open a stretch of Sabotage. Black Sabbath cut the thing at Morgan Studios in London in early 1975, with Mike Butcher in the chair alongside the band, and it landed as the first track when the album came out on the 28th of July that year. Before Ozzy even opens his mouth you get the hum of amplifiers cranked wide open and a yell of Attack. Folks have sworn for years that the word was Chicken. It was not. Butcher told the story himself. Sabbath had a support act whose manager used to stand behind the band onstage hollering Attack, Attack, so the producer leaned on the talkback and did the same gag from the control room. It stuck, and it still makes the hair stand up when it hits the air on THE ZOO.

Geezer Butler wrote the words, and he has called them the most prophetic lyrics he ever put down. He was looking at the mess of the mid-seventies and writing about pollution, a hole in the sky, the western world going down in the east, oil on everybody's mind, petrol being rationed, and no future in cars. Japan was rising, China was building, the Soviet Union was rattling sabers, and the Middle East was on fire as usual. Geezer has said he usually tried to sneak a little hope into the bleak pictures, because growing up in Aston he had already had his share of violence and he was still a bit of a peace and love bloke underneath the doom. Ozzy takes those lines and rants them like a man who has seen the doorway and does not trust what is on the other side. Looking through a hole in the sky, seeing nowhere through the eyes of a lie, a gateway to heaven and a window in time. Writers have tagged it cosmic travel and apocalyptic warfare. Geezer kept it simpler. Pollution, and a world eating itself.

Tony Iommi's riff is the kind of door-slamming figure that would have sat just fine on Paranoid, only the guitar is harder and bigger than it was on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. The band had been drifting toward orchestras and guest keyboards, Rick Wakeman had sat in on the previous record, and Tony decided they wanted a rock album again. The sound came out meaner. Mick Wall wrote that the song just stops, no fade, no polite goodbye, and that the cutoff underlines the sheer anger in it. Then the record drops straight into Don't Start (Too Late), a little acoustic sketch under a minute long. That title belongs to tape operator David Harris, who kept telling the band not to start because he was not ready, and they kept starting anyway. Too late. The joke sits right there between the opener and Symptom Of The Universe, which is the other bruiser everybody names from this album.

The whole record was made while the band was being dragged into court by their old manager, Patrick Meehan. Tony has called the sessions a nightmare. They would get a writ, dress up, go sit in court in the morning, then try to get back to Morgan and write. He said you had to have two heads. Lawyers turned up at the studio unannounced, which is where The Writ came from. Tony reckons the aggro fed the music. There is some really heavy stuff on that record, and Hole In The Sky is the first fist through the wall. Bill Ward ended up on the cover in his wife's red tights, and maybe a pair of Ozzy's underpants, because nobody had planned the wardrobe and the mirror idea fell apart on the day. It looked ridiculous. The music did not.

Loudwire later ranked the song well up the list of everything Sabbath cut with Ozzy out front. Pantera took a run at it on the Nativity In Black tribute, which tells you the riff still had teeth a couple of decades on. For the Zoo Freaks it is the sound of four Birmingham lads who had already invented the heavy stuff deciding they were not going to get any prettier just because the lawyers were at the door.

The four of them came out of the factories and the back streets of Aston, trying to get clear of a life on the line. Ozzy Osbourne had left school around fifteen, worked as a plumber's mate, a toolmaker, and a fellow who tested car horns, and once tattooed his own name across his knuckles with a needle and polish. Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward were knocking around the same circuit in bands like Rare Breed and Mythology. They pulled a gang together that briefly included a sax player and a second guitarist and called it the Polka Tulk Blues Band, a name Geezer lifted off a shop in Handsworth on the way to a gig. It lasted about two shows. One of them was a caravan park where the audience got up and left. Tony told the extra players they were on their bikes, and the name shrank to Earth.

Earth played the blues the way the Birmingham bands did, with an eye on Cream and the rest of that circuit, until Geezer brought in a song about a figure he thought he saw at the foot of the bed after flirting with Dennis Wheatley novels and a bit of the dark stuff. He quit the dabbling after that night. The song took its title from the old Boris Karloff film Black Sabbath, and audiences reacted to it like nothing else in the set. There was already another band called Earth, so they took the song's name for the group. Tony said that was when it started to happen. The name sounded mysterious, it gave people something to think about, and it gave them a direction. Geezer had been humming Holst's Mars on the bass. Tony bent it, and the lumbering figure that became the title track of the first album wrote itself. From there it was the heavy, the downtuned strings after Tony lost the tips of his fingers in a sheet-metal accident, the crosses, and a run of records that put a new word in the rock dictionary.

By the time they reached Sabotage they were the original four still, Ozzy up front, Tony on guitar, Geezer on bass and most of the words, Bill on the drums, and they were fighting the business as hard as they were fighting the songs. Hole In The Sky is what that fight sounded like when they pointed it at the world instead of the courtroom. If you want the official trail, the band's own site keeps the Sabotage notes and the Hole In The Sky lyric at Black Sabbath. Their verified pages sit at Facebook, Instagram, and X. The long-running fan archive Black Sabbath Online has the full Sabotage entry, track list and all, at black-sabbath.com, and the same crew posts from @sabbathfans. Spin it loud. The amps were already doing the work.