Classic Rock Revisited's Jeb Wright has issued a new interview conducted with legendary producer Tom Allom, who has turned the knobs on some of the best heavy metal and hard rock albums ever to be produced. One of his first jobs in the studio was with an unknown band called BLACK SABBATH. An excerpt from the interview follows:

Q: So you were pretty new to the job when you recorded Black Sabbath.

A: "I was. I started in the fall of 1968, so I had only been there for a year, if that. It was baptism by fire. I had no idea who Black Sabbath was when they came in. On the second album, we did the tracks in the same studio and then we took the tapes to Island Studios and transferred them all up to eight-track, which was Paranoid. I suppose that was the album with 'Iron Man' on it. When I got confronted with the original four-track tapes for the Classic Album Series I was interviewed for a couple of years ago; when I heard what was on the four-tracks compared to the final mixes, we didn’t do much in the way of overdubs. It was still very much the basic tracks that formed the album."

Q: When you heard Black Sabbath for the first time, what was your impression?

A: "We captured a new sound and Rodger Bain, who was the producer, has to take credit for that. He really did understand the way it should sound. I had never seen the band live. Rodger was a very intuitive producer and he never got anywhere enough credit for what he did. There was just something about it. I can’t say that we did this, or we did that, it just happened."

Q: How long did it take to record the first Black Sabbath album?

A: "The first album was done in four days. It was two sessions, from 10 AM to 10 PM. Can you imagine getting Black Sabbath up at 10 AM? Those two sessions were for the recording. Then, there were two sessions from 10 AM to 6 PM for the mixing. After those four sessions, it was done, finished and in the can. I think the whole record cost £500, including the photo of that lady in front of the mill. They did quite a good return on that £500."

Q: How much longer did Paranoid take?

A: "Paranoid didn’t take much longer, as we did the tracks the same sort of way. I would not think the whole thing took more than ten days. Master Of Reality was the third one that I did. They wrote that in the studio and that kind of dragged on and took a massive month [laughter]. That one was a test, as they were not really prepared like they were for the first album. They recorded, essentially, all of the tracks on the first album beforehand. I had done the demos when they were Earth; that was before they became Black Sabbath. I did the demos and then they came back about six months later. When I did the demos, I was really new to the job. Rodger Bain and I got along well."

Read the full interview at this location.