Before they were BLACK SABBATH they were EARTH, and before they were the loudest band in Birmingham they were a blues group. There is tape of it.
Jim Simpson, the band's first manager, has been talking about those recordings on "Brad's Basement", the interview show Brad Henshaw launched on Rockefellas TV earlier this year. Simpson managed the four of them at the very start, and the collection he has been trying to put out — "Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes" — runs to nine tracks from 1969.
The contents are not what a BLACK SABBATH discography would lead you to expect. There are three covers: "Blue Suede Shoes", "Evenin'" and "Wee Wee Baby". There are two versions of "Song For Jim", a track named after Simpson himself. There is an untitled piece and one called "Free Man". And there are early recordings of "Wicked World" and "Warning", two songs that would survive the name change onto the first album.
Simpson came to the tapes almost by accident — "Well, it was a coincidence, really," he says — and was introduced to them by Bill Ward. His reaction once he had heard them was that the rest of the world ought to hear them too: "Hmm, I can't not tell the rest."
Getting there took longer than he expected. Simpson approached the band in September 2024 about releasing the material and, by his account, received threatening emails; when they declined to be involved, he offered the royalties to St Basils, the Birmingham charity that works with homeless young people. A July 2025 release was planned and did not happen. The sleeve notes, he says, "irked somebody" — and that somebody was Sharon Osbourne.
That appears to be behind him. In April 2026 Osbourne said publicly that the matter was settled and that all four original members own the demos.
What Simpson wants understood is what the tapes actually show. "They were a blues band when I met them," he says — a fact that tends to get flattened out of the origin story, in which four teenagers invent heavy metal in one motion. The tapes show four musicians who could already play, in a genre nobody remembers them for, months before the thing they are remembered for existed.
"It's a historical document," Simpson says. "If we can finally release this album, it will be a great gift to the music world."