“As far as we were concerned, we were just a blues band that had decided to write some scary music.”

“Bands like The Move, Traffic and The Moody Blues were proving that you didn’t have to be from Liverpool to be successful.”

“There was a cinema called The Orient outside the community centre where we rehearsed in Six Ways, and whenever it showed a horror film the queue would go all the way down the street and around the corner. ‘Isn’t it strange how people will pay money to frighten themselves?’ I remember Tony [Iommi] saying one day. ‘Maybe we should stop doing blues and write scary music instead.’”

“Pink Floyd was music for rich college kids, and we were the exact f**king opposite of that.”

“Officially, we didn’t have a band leader.Unofficially, we all knew it was Tony [Iommi].”

“But the thing with us was, we didn’t really need anyone to make us world famous – we were already halfway there.”

“Meanwhile, we’d been kicked out of school at fifteen and had worked in factories and slaughtered animals for a living, but then we’d made something of ourselves, even though the whole system was against us. So how upset could we be when clever people said we were no good?”