As Black Sabbath entered the 1980s, things were changing for the band. After sticking with the classic line-up throughout the 1970s, Ozzy Osbourne was now out of the band and Ronnie James Dio was in. Soon changes would creep into other positions as well. This would turn out to be the trend for most of the 80s, which became a tumultuous decade of instability for the band. Over the course of four studio albums they changed their lead vocalist four times, with other vocalists even doing short album-less stints in between. There were ongoing turnarounds for nearly every other band position as well.
The only stabilising factor was the legendary ever-present guitar player Tony Iommi. As Sabbath’s keeper of the flame he is the only band member who has always been there – on every album, at every live show, and involved in every line-up. He was Sabbath’s guiding star musically and the main songwriter, although a collaborative one.
By Iommi’s side throughout the difficult 80s was the ever-faithful Geoff Nicholls, who had been drafted from Quartz during the pre-sessions of the Heaven And Hell album to help out. He ended up staying until 2004, for the most part as a non-official capacity, but he was just as important and musically contributing as any band member. His importance during these years cannot be overstated, both in the studio as well as playing live (usually from the side of the stage or behind a curtain). His lack of visibility made things look worse than they were, although they were certainly bad enough.
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The line-up instabilities during the 1980s have made it easy for many to dismiss a lot of the band’s musical efforts from this time. Personally, I have always enjoyed these years, even finding them deeply fascinating. It should not be forgotten that the decade started on the highest note possible with the release of Heaven and Hell and The Mob Rules, with Ronnie James Dio as the vocalist. These are possibly some of the best heavy metal albums of all time.
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Revolving door memberships are still never a good sign, but at the same time, the people who were there were always high-calibre musicians. Sure, they went through four vocalists in four albums, but what vocalists! Ronnie James Dio, Ian Gillan, Glenn Hughes, and Tony Martin, anyone?
Tony Martin was admittedly a relative unknown to the masses when he was announced as the new vocalist in 1987. He came on board just in time to add vocals to the Eternal Idol album. To a lot of people, this was a case of “here we go again – meet this year’s Sabbath vocalist!” Understandable at the time.
Martin would however silence the doubters. He clearly had the vocal chops, and would also bring stability to the band. He ended up being the second longest serving vocalist in the band, staying until 1996, just stepping aside long enough to allow Ronnie James Dio to return for the 1992 Dehumanizer album and tour.
Headless Cross was the title track of Black Sabbath’s 14th studio album, and the second one with Tony Martin behind the microphone. Having arrived too late to be able to contribute much beyond vocals on The Eternal Idol, this would be his first chance to prove himself as a creative force within the band.
The album had a difficult birth amongst record company turmoil and band line-up changes. After The Eternal Idol, Black Sabbath were dropped from Warner Bros. Records in 1988 after staying with them for eighteen years. Vertigo Records had an option to keep them on, but were not interested. Iommi met with Miles Copeland, who owned I.R.S. Records at the time. Copeland told him: “You know how to write albums, you know what people want. You do it and I’m fine with it.” This persuaded Iommi to sign to I.R.S.
Iommi was keen to make Black Sabbath into a force to be reckoned with, and with a lot of the prior players moving on or not being kept on, he wanted a new start with established players who would not just live up to the band’s past glories, but take it into the future.
One of the first Iommi reached out to was the legendary English drummer Cozy Powell (known from Jeff Beck, Rainbow, MSG, Whitesnake, and many more). The timing was right, and the two began writing songs at Iommi’s house.
“Cozy was really helpful,” Iommi write in his autobiography Iron Man. “He stayed for two or three weeks at my house and we’d sit in a room, get a bottle of wine and off we’d go. I had all these ideas, Cozy would tap along and come up with ideas as well. We had the tape player going and just jammed around. If nothing came up we’d chuck it and go for the next one. Maybe we’d go for a walk, come back and have another go. It really worked well.”
Tony Martin would eventually join them for rehearsals to add melody lines and lyrics, allowing full songs and final arrangements to take shape. The first night that the three of them came together for a songwriting session, they quickly worked out the basics for three new songs. Creativity was flowing, and in the excitement, Tony Martin ruined Tony Iommi’s 600 year old table when the lyrics that poured out of him indented through the paper into the old wood. Their creativity was kept for posterity!
The remarkable thing is that before they’d gotten to this point, even Martin’s position in the band had been debated. There had been a desire to bring in name players with a bit of legacy in every band position, and initially Iommi and Nicholls had especially considered bringing back Ronnie James Dio as a vocalist, or possibly even ask David Coverdale to join the band. In the end, Powell became a staunch supporter of Martin continuing and convinced Iommi to keep him on.
Geoff Nicholls recalls that the vocalist situation could have turned out very different. “Tony and Cozy were talking which was looking promising,” he told Garry Sharpe-Young for the book Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. “Initially they discussed getting in another name singer. Both Ronnie James Dip and David Coverdale were mentioned again. Cozy was keen on David obviously [they had a history together in Whitesnake], but was ready to concede on Ronnie if that was on the cards. So, for quite some time, the original working idea was to get Ronnie in for Headless Cross. Cozy and Ronnie didn’t like each other even though they respected each other’s abilities. Tony Iommi was keen on Ronnie again. Anyhow, when Cozy heard the original version of Black Moon he changed his mind totally. He loved the way Tony Martin sang that track and then started to think some continuity would be a better approach. Once Cozy committed to Tony Martin he backed him 100% and there was no more talk of anyone else.”
With Iommi, Powell and Martin making up the nucleus of the band, supported by Nicholls, the material was coming together and they were very pleased with it. As soon as the songs were finished, they started working on full band arrangements, rehearsing them and recording demos.
Around this time, Iommi got a call from Gloria Butler (wife and manager of original Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler) who said the bassist wanted to rejoin Sabbath. This was definitely of interesting to Iommi and some back-and-forth discussions happened. For some reason the decision seemed to drag a bit, and at the end of the day, Butler ended up joined Ozzy Osbourne’s No Rest For the Wicked tour lineup instead.
Sabbath held out for Butler as long as they could. When those plans fell through, they were close to going into the studio and needed a quick solution for the bass situation. That solution came in the form of Laurence Cottle who provided bass parts as a session player. He did not come from a metal background, but his versatility and pure skill ended up working out great in the end. He would come up with several ideas and suggestions, with co-producers Iommi and Powell doing their best to pick the approaches they felt worked best.
“Laurence was a jazz player, and a bloody good one at that,” Iommi says in Iron Man. “He’d come to the studio and say, ‘What sort of thing do you want? What about this? Or that?’ And he’d play all these different kind of things. We’d say, ‘Yeah! That’s it!’ He did a great job and that was it. He played everything on Headless Cross and left after the recording.”
The bass playing on the album not just fits the material, but has a sprightliness and creativity about it that adds a lot. At the same time, the pounding bottom end is very much there when needed, as heard on the title track.
When the time came to start touring the album, the band recruited the Scottish bassist Neil Murray (Whitesnake, Gary Moore, National Health, Colosseum II) who was a better long-term fit for the band.
The Headless Cross album was recorded between August and November 1988 in the Woodcray Studio. It was located at a little farm place in Berkshire, not too far from London. The place offered full studio facilities as well as three bedrooms. This suited the band as Cozy would come on his motorbike and then go home, as he lived not too far from there.
The album was co-produced by Iommi and Powell. “We were really determined to make a good album,“ Iommi says in Iron Man. “We [Powell and Iommi] were excited because we were playing together and we brought out the best in each other.”
The album opens with an intro called The Gates of Hell, which in turn introduces the title track as the first real song on the album. The intro is, as often was the case with these types of tracks for Black Sabbath, ambient soundscapes rather than consisting of a melody or any kind of music. Geoff Nicholls was the master of creating these types of passages, and although the intro also credits Iommi and Powell, there is little doubt who this mainly originated from.
The Gates of Hell intro leads directly into the Headless Cross track, setting it up wonderfully while giving it an ominous ambience from the get-go. The spooky introduction certainly fits the grim subject matter.
The Headless Cross song is based on a true story that happened in the Middle Ages while the bubonic plague epidemic was going through Europe. When the plague came to a small village in the wider Birmingham area called Old Church, the people went to the hill of the headless cross where they prayed to God for help. No one survived.
Look through the people, and on through the mist
To the hill of the headless cross
Where all witches meet, on a night such as this
And the power of darkness is host
They come face to face, eye to eye, soul to soul
With and Angel that fell from the sky
Borne on the air, the screams and the wails
Of the masses appointed to die
Listen for the feet as they pound the land to a tune of thunder
Watch as the legions ride again to a fate of death or torture
At the Headless Cross, at the Headless Cross
Musically, the track may seem basic at first, with a simple drumbeat set against a bass rhythm and an atmospheric synth bedding. The approach is very percussive and rhythm-based, so it probably comes as no surprise that the initial idea for the song came from drummer Cozy Powell.
“I had an idea for the basic track which I knew would work,” Powell told Metal Hammer in 1989, “and Tony had the riff, so we put the two together. Then Tony Martin had the idea of the ‘Headless Cross’ story and we made that one the theme track for the album. It was one of those tracks that sounded great as soon as we started playing it and it had the theme of the nucleus of the new band running through it with snatches of the old band as well.”
The song’s stark approach initially allows Tony Martin’s vocals to take centre stage when they come in. They almost stand alone against the naked arrangement, with Martin adding strong melodic vocals on top. Every nuance of his performance comes through clearly. The song gets a lot of power when the full guitars come in for the pre-chorus, choruses, and solo sections, but the verses always resume their more naked form, allowing Martin’s vocal to caution us, warn us, and even mock us as the song goes through its various stages.
The sessions were energic with the entire band showing much enthusiasm, which shows in a number of ways. One of them is that the vocalist pushed himself to deliver some incredible high-pitched vocals, which he would later come to regret a bit.
“The trouble with songs like Headless Cross and When Death Calls,” he told Garry Sharpe-Young for the book Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, “is that it’s all very well pushing yourself like that in the studio to get those notes and hold them, but live you very often just can’t do it. Actually, live my vocals fail me a lot but unlike a lot of singers I can work around it. I’ve developed this way of dealing with things like that because the worst thing is to cancel a show. […] I can go for a third of fifth either way. Hitting that perfect note, whilst I can do it, is not always guaranteed. I wish I had Glenn Hughes voice because he just seems so at ease with it.”
All the lyrics on the Headless Cross album were fully written by Tony Martin, who has a strong connection to that name. It is not just the title of a song and an album, but also the name of a village in the vicinity of Birmingham, which funnily enough is where Martin has made his home. “What makes it worse is that I live next to a graveyard too!” the singer added.
Creative license saw the singer use Headless Cross as the setting to give the song more of a suitable Sabbath-like title. The town itself bears little in the way of sinister history as ‘Headless’ is an adoption of the local landowner Headley’s title. Still, it sounded evocative enough.
The song’s lyrics are about the Black Death plague that swept through Europe and ravaged Worcestershire, Shropshire and Staffordshire during 1349-50. Various forms of plague would take their toll in the area until well into the 1640s. The lyrics are centred on the borough of Alvechurch just south of Birmingham.
“The actual name Headless Cross comes from a place near Birmingham,” Martin told Metal Hammer in 1989. “There’s something I have to clear up here – we’ve had some stick from Birmingham newspapers saying it was all wrong and Headless Cross is a term for goodness, not evil, but the whole idea came from an associated village called Old Church that was wiped out by the plague and I’ve tied the two together. It’s a story, it’s not intended to be fact!”
This village suffered particularly at the hands of the contagion burying over half the local population in the aptly named Pestilence Lane.
Conceptually, the lyrics have predominantly occult and satanic elements, with the song being built around descriptions and superstitions related to the Black Death plague. They were seen as anything from manifistations of the power of Satan to punishment from God and anything in between.
From the first evil night, when a black flash of light
Cut the crucifix half to the ground
There’s no escaping the power of Satan
On a nation so brave and so proud
Martin shared some notes on his approach to lyric writing via a Facebook post in 2022: “For those of you who are interested: people ask me HOW i write lyrics. Well… I am a “collector” of words. I write them down as they come to me without form or rhyme. Just a collection of words. Then when i am composing, I scan them casually and they INSPIRE me to write the lyrics.”
The Facebook post included an image of a word sheet, saying “This sheet is from when i was writing the Headless Cross album. You may find references to When Death Calls and Devil & Daughter. It is not very often i use the exact phrase or set of words, but sometimes it will work. This one page inspired possibly 3 songs. When Iommi wrote the riffs, I put the words in the order I needed, then did up to 3 melodies and tested the lyrics. […] He never told me what to write – it was all up to me.”
Headless Cross ends with a slow fade-out, with Martin adding vocal ad libs. This became how most songs on the album ended, with only Devil & Daughter and Call of the Wild having established end sections. On Headless Cross, Martin can be heard adding lines like ‘where will you run to?’ and ‘look to the headless cross!’ as the song dims.
The cover image was designed by Kevin Wimlett, with the overall sleeve designed by The Leisure Process at their offices in Little Portland Street in London. There were some interesting variations, as the UK sleeve was in black & white while some European releases added a purple hue to the text and light colouring to the cross motif.
The band ended up releasing three singles from the album. The title track was the first one released on 3 April 1989, with Devil & Daughter following in June, and Call of the Wild later in the year. Interestingly, the two latter songs had their titles changed due to Ozzy Osbourne releasing songs with the same titles on his album No Rest For the Wicked. Call of the Wild was originally titled Hero, and Devil & Daughter was originally titled Devil’s Daughter.
A music video was shot for the title track – the only song on the album to get a video, even though it featured several singles. The video was shot at the Battle Abbey in Battle, near Hastings in Sussex. The band can be seen performing the song on the exact spot where William the Conqueror had defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings about a thousand years earlier.
The dilapidated old abbey looked like a very suitable location at daylight, but filming did not start until midnight. The director was keen to capture the light coming back up in the morning out of these ruins while the band played there. This might have looked nice, but quickly became very problematic. “By that time it was hellishly cold, and we were frozen stiff,” Tony Iommi said in Iron Man. “Cozy was drinking brandy just to keep warm, but he got pissed as a parrot. He nearly fell off his drum stool. I had a big red nose and couldn’t feel my hands. We did catch the morning light, but we caught flu as well.”
“I have a vivid memory of that video because it went on for ever,” adds Tony Martin. “We started at seven in the evening and went on filming all night until seven in the morning. I kept pointing out to them that the sky was changing colour but they didn’t seem to care. Consequently, when they edited the video, the sky keeps changing. The other thing was that they had these exploding crosses in the video too. They blew them up and then they started to burn. They thought it looked great but we said ‘Er, listen… stone isn’t supposed to burn is it?’ I think the reply was something like ‘This is Black Sabbath – we can do what we bloody well like!’ But anyway, I still maintain that stone doesn’t burn.”
Hardships aside, the video clip served them well. In Europe, the album was promoted well and did brisker business than even the classic Sabbath albums when it was released on 24 April 1989. Headless Cross was praised by critics and fans as the best Sabbath album in years. Said AllMusic’s Eduardo Rivadavia: “Arguably the finest Black Sabbath album since Ozzy or Dio, Headless Cross also featured one of Black Sabbath’s most formidable lineups.”
In the US things were worse. The album was poorly distributed and barely available in record stores and most people struggled to find it. Given this, it’s a miracle that the album even spent as much as eight weeks on the Billboard 200 chart, peaking at number 115. The North American tour ended up being pulled. Fortunately, elsewhere (and particularly in Europe) it was a totally different story.
For the live show in support of this album, Ave Satani (the main theme from Jerry Goldsmith’s Oscar-winning soundtrack for The Omen), was used as the intro tape, beginning as the house lights went down. This would then segue into a taped recording of The Gates of Hell before the band would begin the show with Headless Cross. The intro-tape of Ave Satani/The Gates of Hell was used many times during various tours over the years, all the way up to the Ozzy reunion shows. Headless Cross would be played on every subsequent tour as long as Tony Martin was in the band.
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