A Timeline
AUGUST 30, 1969
Black Sabbath play their first gig. Hot on the heels of January’s souped-up power-blues debut album from Led Zeppelin, summer sees Birmingham band Earth rebrand as Black Sabbath, minting a malevolent and seismically heavy sound that will influence everything it touches. “I get a bit embarrassed,” Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi will reflect, “but it’s fantastic to be called the inventor of metal.”
‘Birmingham band Earth rebrand as Black Sabbath, minting a seismically heavy sound.’
JUNE 3, 1970
Deep Purple release In Rock. With incoming frontman Ian Gillan supplying a seminal metal scream, the MkII line-up overpowers Jon Lord’s orchestral whimsy with a brutal album. “We had a determination to put our stamp on what we were,” reflects Roger Glover, “which was a rock band, not a classical, pseudo-artsy progressive band.”
JUNE 13, 1970
Alice Cooper puts the ‘shock’ in rock. Creating a spidery alterego inspired by Bette Davis’s “disgusting caked make-up” from Whatever Happened To Baby Jane? – and staging mock-executions – the man born Vincent Furnier brings shock-rock to Middle America at the Cincinnati Pop Festival. Kiss and Twisted Sister’s Dee Snider are surely taking notes, but Cooper proves to be ahead of his time, taking a custard pie in the face.
JULY 21, 1971
Tony Iommi breaks the Richter Scale on Master Of Reality. Iommi’s use of drop tunings for Black Sabbath’s third album was born of necessity, the guitarist having lost the tips of middle and ring fingers on his right hand to a sheet-metal cutter (“I tuned down because playing at standard pitch used to hurt”). Happy accident or otherwise, doom-metal and sludge-metal arguably started right here, with the brutal C#-tuned grind of tracks like Children Of The Grave.
JUNE 1975
are born. Ian ‘Lemmy’ Kilmister turns drug-related ejection from Hawkwind to his advantage, forming the pioneering bastard-child power trio whose to . Even so, he rejects the tag: “We’re a rock‘n’roll band. Everyone always describes us as heavy metal, even when I tell them otherwise.”
