How Lovecraft’s cosmic horror found its way into Black Sabbath

“Could it be that the dream-soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which the simple and halting tongue of dullness could not utter?”
H.P. Lovecraft, Beyond the Wall of Sleep

Before the countless bands who would build entire universes around Cthulhu, the Necronomicon and the Great Old Ones (there is what we now call Lovecraftian black metal, after all), there was Black Sabbath.

Within the tracklist of their 1970 self-titled debut, the first heavy metal album of all time, buried between The Wizard and N.I.B., sits a song whose title opens a door directly into the strange fiction of H.P. Lovecraft: Behind the Wall of Sleep.

The title is taken almost verbatim from Lovecraft’s 1919 short story Beyond the Wall of Sleep, and the connection goes much deeper than a borrowed name, reaching into the actual ideas Lovecraft built his fiction around. Both works share the notion that sleep is a wall separating ordinary human existence from something vast, foreign and potentially terrifying.

Lovecraft’s fiction repeatedly suggests that what we perceive as reality is only the tip of the iceberg, underneath which can be found civilisations, alien intelligences, other dimensions and forces so immense that humanity barely registers their existence. And evil. Encountered through indifference, through a universe that does not care about us the slightest. 

These concepts would populate extreme metal lyrics decades later, but at the dawn of the new decade, when Black Sabbath emerged from the murky streets of Aston, Birmingham, the connection between Lovecraftian cosmic horror and heavy music was still largely unexplored territory.

They surely weren’t the first to link the Providence writer to music – there was, in the late 1960s, the acid/psych rock band named H. P. Lovecraft, for instance – but it was the godfathers of heavy metal that opened the doors to Lovecraft within heavier realms.

Geezer Butler, the band’s bassist and principal lyricist, was a voracious reader of the strange and supernatural, and Lovecraft’s influence on Behind the Wall of Sleep is particularly unusual because the song isn’t an adaptation of the story, but something evev more profound if related to the creator of the alternate dimension of the Dreamlands.

According to Butler, he was reading Beyond the Wall of Sleep, fell asleep, and dreamed the lyrics and the main riff in a process that seems oddly… Lovecraftian! When he woke, he wrote them down and played the riff to the rest of the band at rehearsal. 

Lovecraft’s 1919 tale revolves around the character of Joe Slater, a violent and mentally disturbed man whose dreams reveal something extraordinary. He was a damaged human with a damaged consciousness, but behind all this, concealed, there was another form of awareness, a cosmic intelligence encountered beyond the “wall of sleep”. Madness, at first glance, but it gradually suggests that Slater’s mind has access to a reality far larger than the waking world can comprehend.

Sabbath take that premise and throw it into a nightmare of their own.

“Vengeance cupped within the flower / Deadly petals with strange power”

Flowers become threatening, beauty becomes poisonous. In other words, the familiar and the charming are subtly transformed into something alien.

Then comes the song’s most arresting image:

“Sleeping wall of remorse / Turns your body to a corpse”

Sleep and death become intertwined, and the wall becomes a boundary between existence and annihilation, not simply what divides dreams from consciousness.

And then, suddenly, the wall breaks.

“Now from darkness there springs light / Wall of sleep is cool and bright / Wall of sleep is lying broken / Sun shines in you have awoken”

Here, darkness brings illumination rather than terror, and we find ourselves in front of almost the opposite of conventional horror.

Musically, compared with the extremity that followed, Behind the Wall of Sleep feels almost gentle, but in 1970, all this was new territory. Iommi’s enormously distorted guitar sound, Butler’s physical yet technical bass lines, Bill Ward’s mad jazzy drums and Ozzy Osbourne’s otherworldly delivery were creating a musical language. The music was heavy, but it was also a strange blues dragged into darker territory, transformed into something dreamlike and also threatening. A combination that would prove enormously influential… the beginning of heavy metal.

Lovecraft’s shadow would eventually spread throughout extreme metal. Directly, through songs and albums dedicated to Cthulhu and the Mythos, or indirectly, through music obsessed with cosmic insignificance, altered consciousness, ancient forces and realities beyond human comprehension. But perhaps it makes sense that one of the earliest examples of Lovecraft’s influence on metal isn’t a song about Cthulhu at all, but a song about sleep and the thin wall separating what we know from what we don’t, which is exactly what heavy metal would keep returning to.