In an interview with BBC Radio , Tony Iommi Black Sabbath 's greatest tracks , the classic "Paranoid," was created at the last minute as a filler track for the album.
According to Tony, Black Sabbath was recording their second album, which would become Paranoid , but the number of songs the band had at the end of the recordings wasn't enough, and producer Rodger Bain asked for one more track to be made.
“Everyone went out to lunch and I stayed in the studio and created the riff for 'Paranoid',” Tony recounts. “I waited for them to come back and told them we needed another song and they said 'Oh, no', but I said I had an idea and played it for them. We wrote it, recorded it, and that was it. Basically, 'Paranoid' was a filler . It was made for that. We had never done a three-minute song before, so it was just to fill the space.”
According to Tony Iommi, the success that came with "Paranoid" ended up attracting a different audience than the one Black Sabbath had had until then, which made the band rethink the direction they were going.
“We started seeing a lot of girls screaming, which didn’t usually happen at our shows,” he recounts. “And we went on Top of the Pops and things like that. When we did Top of the Pops , we said, ‘That’s it, we’re never doing this again. We’re not a pop band.’”
READ ALSO: Tony Iommi takes responsibility for the end of Black Sabbath, but doesn't rule out a reunion.
