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Slipknot frontman Corey Taylor has paid tribute to Black Sabbath ahead of the metal icons’ final show in Birmingham tomorrow night. While Slipknot are one of the few giant metal bands to not be playing the stacked bill at Villa Park, he and his bandmates have been profoundly influenced by Sabbath all the same, as he explains to the BBC in an interview published earlier this week.
“Sabbath gave us the blueprint, Sabbath gave us the recipe,” he explains. “They gave us the cookbook, man. The mystique was in the lyrics. It was in the sound. It was in the way that everything was just a little darker.”
Taylor describes Sabbath’s terrifying, eponymous track, taken from the self-titled debut album released on February 13 1970 and generally considered the ground zero of heavy metal, as “one of the scariest songs I ever heard,” adding that he plays it when he “wants to go someplace mentally”.
“I don’t have to look for, you know, Damien Thorn [the lead character and antagonist of classic 1976 horror The Omen]. I don’t have to look for Mercyful Fate.
“I go back to the beginning. I go back to Black Sabbath, the song and the rest is history.”
Featuring Sabbath themselves playing their final ever show – as well as their first show with all four original members of Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward for 20 years – the Back To The Beginning extravaganza will also feature appearances from Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool, Slayer, Mastodon, Gojira and many more. It will be streamed via the Back To The Beginning website.
