Iron Man by Black Sabbath

Iron Man is a song by the English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, recorded in June 1970 for their second album, Paranoid. Warner Bros. released it as a single in the United States in October 1971, and it reached number 52 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1972, the highest any Black Sabbath single has climbed on that chart. A live version recorded for the 1998 album Reunion won the Grammy Award for Best Metal Performance in 2000.

Black Sabbath wrote the music before the lyrics. Tony Iommi has said the riff arrived in a rehearsal room while Bill Ward played a slow, steady pattern on the kick drum. Iommi answered it on the spot, bending his open low E string behind the nut to get the groaning sound that opens the track, then found the main riff right after. He later said of that day, "In my head, I could hear it as a monster." Iommi has also called Iron Man more typical of early Sabbath than Paranoid, the title track, which the band wrote quickly as filler to round out the album.

Iommi played that riff with the tips of two fingers missing. A factory accident as a teenager had cost him the ends of the middle and ring fingers on his right hand, which is his fretting hand because he plays left-handed. He made his own fingertip caps and switched to lighter strings so he could keep bending notes, and the heavy, sluggish feel of his playing grew partly out of those limits.

The name came from Ozzy Osbourne. On hearing the riff, he said it sounded like a big iron bloke walking about, and the working title became Iron Bloke. Geezer Butler, the band's bassist and main lyricist, took the idea and turned it into a science fiction story. In his lyrics a man travels into the future, sees the end of the world, and comes back to warn everyone. On the way home he passes through a magnetic field that turns him to steel. Nobody listens to him, people mock him, and he takes his revenge by bringing about the disaster he came back to prevent.

Butler grew up in a strict Catholic household, and he has said he meant the character as a kind of Christ figure, one who punishes the people who rejected him instead of forgiving them. He pulled from Hammer horror films, the occult magazine Man, Myth and Magic, and the novels of H. G. Wells. He has also been firm that the song has nothing to do with the Marvel Comics hero of the same name. He did not read American comics as a boy, and the character never crossed his mind while writing.

All four members share the writing credit: Iommi on guitar, Butler on bass, Ward on drums and Osbourne on vocals. Rodger Bain produced the sessions, and Tom Allom engineered them. The band cut Paranoid in London across a few days in June 1970, working at Regent Sound and Island Studios. Throughout the sessions, Bain and Allom could not get Ward's bass drum to sound as big on tape as it did in the room, since the microphones they had to work with were not built for that kind of volume.

Accounts differ on how the band made the robotic voice that says "I am Iron Man" at the start. A popular story holds that Osbourne spoke the line into a metal fan. Other accounts say the voice was run through a ring modulator, or that Allom recorded Osbourne and then slowed the tape down. No one involved has confirmed any of them.

Paranoid came out in Britain in September 1970 on Vertigo and reached American stores in January 1971. The full album cut of Iron Man runs almost six minutes, and the single edit was cut down to about three and a half, with Electric Funeral on the B side. The single stayed out of the American top 40 and reached number 68 in Canada. The song's tempo and key are listed on the Iron Man key and BPM page.

Rolling Stone placed Iron Man at number 317 on its 2004 list of the 500 greatest songs of all time, and at number 7 on its 2023 ranking of the 100 greatest heavy metal songs. VH1 named it the greatest heavy metal song ever. In professional wrestling, the tag team the Road Warriors walked to the ring through the 1980s to a reworked version called We Are Iron Men, and the punk band NOFX recorded a cover for their Maximum Rocknroll EP.

The song plays over the end credits of the 2008 Marvel film Iron Man, right after Tony Stark announces his identity to the press, and it also turned up in the film's video game and in the trailer for Iron Man 2 in 2010. Two years later, Stark wore a Black Sabbath shirt in The Avengers.

The original lineup reunited in the late 1990s, and the Reunion album captured them playing Iron Man live in Birmingham, the city where the band formed. On July 5, 2025, the four original members played together one last time at Back to the Beginning, a farewell concert at Villa Park in Birmingham, and Iron Man was part of the set. Osbourne died later that month at 76. In the weeks after, Iron Man returned to the UK singles chart and reached number 48, its peak there. The song is certified platinum in Britain.