Geezer Butler has named Never Say Die! – recorded in Canada – as “easily the worst” Black Sabbath album.
"We tried to manage ourselves and produce the record ourselves,” the 73-year-old rocker told Metal Edge. “We wanted to do it on our own, but in truth, not one of us had a single clue about what to do.
“By that point, we were spending more time with lawyers and in court rather than being in the studio writing. It was just too much pressure on us, and the writing suffered.”
Never Say Die!, Black Sabbath’s eight studio album, was recorded in early 1978 at Sounds Interchange Studios in Toronto. “That's when the problems started,” Tommy Iommi told the now-defunct magazine Sounds shortly after the album was released. "Why Toronto? Because of the tax, really. ... We got there and it had a dead sound – totally wrong. We couldn't get a real live sound. So what we had to do was rip the carpet up and try to make it as live as we could. They were okay about it, but it took time to get it exactly right.”
In his interview with Metal Edge to promote his forthcoming memoir Into the Void: From Birth to Black Sabbath and Beyond (out June 6), Butler said he feels differently about the band’s 1970 sophomore album Paranoid.
“It was a totally complete album. It wasn't forced, and the chemistry between the four of us was so fluid,” he said. “I remember getting together to do that record, and we wrote literally everything immediately. Each song came together so easily and had such fire. And each time we would go into rehearsal, we'd come out with a completed song.
“That's why that album is special, because of how naturally things came together. It was the most organic record that Sabbath – in any era – ever made. It was completely natural, as it should have been.”