50 Years Ago: Black Sabbath’s ‘Sabotage’ Cover Goes Very Wrong

Black Sabbath entered sessions for 1975’s Sabotage amid a pitched legal battle with manager Patrick Meehan. Despite working in “total chaos,” according to bassist and main lyricist Geezer Butler, they emerged with one of their toughest albums. And also, Black Sabbath’s most ridiculous album cover.

Patrick Meehan had taken over for original manager Jim Simpson in 1970, after Black Sabbath scored smash U.K. hits the same year with their self-titled debut and Paranoid. They continued this platinum run through 1974 with Master of Reality, Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath.

But Black Sabbath was somehow still broke. They decided to fire Meehan, kicking off a protracted legal battle that bled into recording Sabotage. “The sound was a bit harder than Sabbath Bloody Sabbath,” guitarist Tony Iommi told Classic Rock magazine. “My guitar sound was harder. That was brought on by all the aggravation we felt over all the business with management and lawyers.”

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Everything culminated as frontman Ozzy Osbourne unleashed a brutal takedown during the LP’s final track, singing “you bought and sold me with your lying words” on “The Writ.” Co-producer Mike Butcher suggested the song title after Meehan’s attorneys barged in on Black Sabbath at London’s Morgan Studios.

“Oh, it was a nightmare,” Iommi told Metal Hammer. “We’d get a writ and we’d end up having to go into bloody court in the morning, all dressed up, then try to get back to the studio afterwards to carry on working.”

The outfits they changed into after these legal proceedings became a point of conversation once Sabotage arrived on July 28, 1975. Osbourne wore a kimono on the cover and that might have been the most widely ridiculed outfit – if not for drummer Bill Ward‘s very tight red tights.

“The only thing we didn’t discuss was what we’d all wear on the day of the shot,” Ward said in Iommi’s 2011 memoir Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath. “Since that shoot day, the band has survived through a tirade of clothing comments and jokes.”

Listen to Black Sabbath’s ‘The Writ’

Black Sabbath’s ‘Sabotage’ Cover Emerges From the Chaos

Later, Black Sabbath confirmed that they believed this was only a dress rehearsal. They thought there’d be an official portrait made later. More appropriate black clothing was supposed to be laid out by designers, but wasn’t there when the group arrived. Apparently, “the original concept had been overruled,” ’70s-era crew members David Tangye and Graham Wright wrote in 2005’s How Black Was Our Sabbath.

All that remained was an inverted mirror idea conceived by Wright, a graphic artist who also served as Ward’s drum tech. Everyone “carried on with the shoot, explaining they would superimpose the images at a later stage and that it would look great,” according to Tangye and Wright. “The session was unbelievably rushed, and the outcome was far from what had been originally envisaged.”

Ward wasn’t even wearing all of his own clothes. “I had this old pair of jeans that were really dirty, so I borrowed my wife’s tights,” he told Classic Rock. “And so that my bollocks wouldn’t be showing under the tights, I also borrowed Ozzy’s underpants, because I had none.”

Then this supposed test image somehow made it onto the front of the album, earning Sabotage a spot among the 50 worst covers ever. “Ironically, the sleeve design that was intended to illustrate the idea of sabotage had instead become a victim of sabotage itself,” Tangye and Wright argued. “By the time they saw it, it was too late to change.”

Or as Butler later bluntly added: “Chaos personified.”

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