Born Again is the eleventh studio album by the English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, released on 12 September 1983 in the United Kingdom.

It is the only album the group recorded with lead vocalist Ian Gillan, their last with bassist Geezer Butler for nine years, and their final album with drummer Bill Ward.

The album has received mixed reviews from critics, but was a commercial success upon its 1983 release, reaching No. 4 in the UK charts. The album also hit the top 40 in the United States. In July 2021, guitarist and founding member Tony Iommi confirmed that the long-lost original master tapes of the album had finally been located, and that he was considering remixing the album for a future re-release.

Origins Following the departure of vocalist Ronnie James Dio and drummer Vinny Appice in 1982, Sabbath's future was in doubt. The band switched management to Don Arden, father of Sharon Osbourne who was married to the band's founding singer Ozzy Osbourne. Arden suggested Ian Gillan of Deep Purple as the new vocalist. The band had considered vocalists such as Robert Plant and David Coverdale before settling on Gillan. With Whitesnake on the verge of breaking up, Iommi was eager to form a new group with Coverdale and drummer Cozy Powell joining him and Butler, but Coverdale and Powell decided at the last minute to continue with Whitesnake (the latter would eventually join Black Sabbath in 1988). Iommi has claimed the band received an audition tape from Michael Bolton who was then working in hard rock before finding success as a pop-ballad singer. However, Butler claims no such thing happened and said Iommi concocted the Bolton story as "a joke". This claim has also been refuted by Bolton himself, who clarified that it was "only a rumor" which might have originated from his band Blackjack once opening a concert for Ozzy.

Iommi told Hit Parader magazine in late 1983 that Gillan was the best candidate, saying "His shriek is legendary." Gillan was at first reluctant, but his manager convinced him to meet with Iommi and Butler at The Bear, a pub in Oxford. After a night of heavy drinking, Gillan officially committed to the project in February 1983. The following morning Gillan had no memory of joining the band and claimed he didn't even like Black Sabbath's music, but the deal had already been struck.

The project was originally intended to be a new supergroup, and the members of the group had no intention of billing themselves as Black Sabbath. At some point after recording had been completed, Arden insisted they use the recognizable Sabbath name, and the members were overruled. Butler reported how Arden had secured a sizable advance from the record company with the proviso that Gillan be involved, and the album issued under the Black Sabbath name.Swedish TV interview, broadcast April 1994, transcribed by Ola Malmström in Sabbath fanzine Southern Cross #14, p19, October 1994

With Cozy Powell electing to remain with Coverdale in Whitesnake, Black Sabbath's longtime drummer Bill Ward was persuaded to return to the band. Ward claimed to be newly sober after leaving the band in 1980 to treat his alcoholism and he assured Iommi and Butler that he was up to recording and touring once again. Ward began drinking at some point during the sessions and returned to Los Angeles for additional addiction treatment once the album was completed, and has remained sober ever since. Ward said he enjoyed making the album, which remains his final studio album with the band.

Recording Sabbath began recording in May 1983 at Richard Branson's Manor Studio, in the Oxfordshire countryside. Engineer Robin Black had worked with the band in the mid-1970s on Sabotage and received a co-producer credit on Born Again.

During recording, the band members lived at Manor Studio while Gillan chose to live outside the house, alone, in a marquee tent on the studio grounds: "I thought he was joking, but when I arrived at the Manor I saw this marquee outside and I thought, fucking hell, he's serious. Ian had put up this big, huge tent. It had a cooking area and a bedroom and whatever else", said Iommi. Butler said that the tent situation and Gillan's refusal to live with his new bandmates, in hindsight, likely indicated how the vocalist didn't view himself as a member of the band.

"Ian's lyrics were about sexual things or true facts, even about stuff that happened at The Manor there and then," Iommi said. "They were good, but quite a departure from Geezer's and Ronnie's lyrics." For example, Gillan returned from a local pub one evening, took a car belonging to drummer Ward, and commenced racing around a go-cart track on the Manor Studio property. He crashed the car, which burst into flames after he escaped uninjured. He wrote the album's opening "Trashed" about the experience. Butler felt that Gillan's lyrics on tracks such as "Digital Bitch" and "Keep It Warm" were good, but much better suited to the musical style of Deep Purple than Black Sabbath.

"Disturbing the Priest" was written after a rehearsal space – set up by Iommi in a small building near a local church – received noise complaints from the resident priests. "We wanted this effect on 'Disturbing the Priest'," recalled the guitarist, "and Bill got this big bucket of water and he got this anvil. It was really heavy, and he'd got it hanging on a piece of rope and lower it in to get this effect: hit it and lower it in, and then lift it out again. It was a great effect, but it took hours to do."

The band got along well, but it became apparent to all involved that Gillan's style did not quite mesh with the Sabbath sound. In 1992, Gillan told director Martin Baker he was "the worst singer Black Sabbath ever had. It was totally, totally incompatible with any music they'd ever done [and] I think the fans probably were in a total state of confusion." In 1992, Iommi was quoted in Guitar World saying "Ian is a great singer" but generally not well suited for Black Sabbath's material. To the contrary, Ward recalled Gillian worked well in the studio and "delicately put lyrics together. It made sense. I thought he did an excellent job."

"I did some of the best drum work on that album…" Bill Ward recalled. "On 'Disturbing the Priest', there were some polyrhythms and some counterpoint things that I was doing, and I was using at least twenty different pieces of percussion towards the end of that song… I was real proud of a lot of the work that I did. Some of it invariably got lost in the mix, but I know that it's printed on those tracks." Butler said that Ward began acting quite strangely during recording and was angrier than he had ever seen him. At one point the drummer began hallucinating and had to be hospitalized, and while he was there the band discovered his secret stash of vodka that he'd been consuming in secret at night. After being released from the hospital, Ward quit the band again and returned to America to sort out his issues, with his drum parts already recorded.

When the band heard the final product, they were horrified at the muffled mix. In his autobiography, Iommi explains that Gillan inadvertently blew a couple of tweeters in the studio speakers by playing the backing tracks too loud and nobody noticed. "We just thought it was a bit of a funny sound, but it went very wrong somewhere between the mix and the mastering and the pressing of that album...the sound was really dull and muffly. I didn't know about it, because we were already out on tour in Europe. By the time we heard the album, it was out and in the charts, but the sound was awful." Butler recalled listening to the tapes in his hotel room and being alarmed at how "muffled and unclear" the tracks were, but Iommi and Black assured him that the issue would be corrected during mixing. Ultimately, the issue never was corrected, with Butler lamenting years later that "that's what happens when you don't hire a bona fide producer, like Martin Birch, to handle things."

For all his misgivings, Gillan remembers the period fondly, stating in the Black Sabbath: 1978–1992 documentary: "[W]e had a good year...And the songs, I think, were quite good."

Breakup After Bill Ward had left the band for rehab, drummer Bev Bevan was hired for the subsequent tour. Bevan was a friend of Iommi's who knew Don Arden well, but he was ultimately not a heavy metal drummer and struggled to fit with their musical style. Gillan refused to learn the lyrics to much of the band's earlier material, and this version of Black Sabbath fell apart with Gillan and Bevan quitting.

The tour was also a breaking point for Butler, who admits in the Black Sabbath: 1978–1992 documentary, "I just got totally disillusioned with the whole thing and I left some time in 1984 after the Born Again tour. I just had enough of it." In 2015, Butler clarified to Dave Everley of Classic Rock how he wanted to spend more time with his family and young children, but there was no acrimony in his departure. Butler felt Gillan was preoccupied with an upcoming Deep Purple reunion and said Iommi was unhappy when Gillan announced his departure from Black Sabbath, as Iommi thought it had been a long-term arrangement. Disagreements with management also contributed to the band's dissolution.

Album cover The Born Again album cover – depicting what Martin Popoff described as a "garish red devil-baby" – is by Steve 'Krusher' Joule, a Kerrang! designer who also worked on Ozzy Osbourne's album Speak of the Devil. It is based on a black-and-white photocopy of a photograph published in a 1968 magazine. – Steve Joule interview Joule was said to have deliberately delivered a sub-par cover due to his involvement with and loyalty to the band's former vocalist Osbourne.

Butler called the cover "a bit sick, but (Arden) loved it, so that was that." Gillan told the press that he vomited when he first saw the picture. However, Iommi approved the cover, which has long been regarded as one of the worst in rock music history. Ben Mitchell of Blender called the cover "awful". The British magazine, Kerrang!, ranked the cover in second place, behind only the Scorpions' Lovedrive, on their list of "10 Worst Album Sleeves in Metal/Hard Rock". The list was based on votes from the magazine's readers. NME included the sleeve on their list of the "29 sickest album covers ever" and Metal Hammer included it on their list of "50 most hilariously ugly rock and metal album covers ever". Sabbath's manager Don Arden was quite hostile towards the band's ex-vocalist Ozzy Osbourne, who had recently married Arden's daughter Sharon, and was fond of telling Osbourne that his children resembled the Born Again cover.

Release and reception

Born Again was released in September 1983 and was a commercial success. It was the highest charting Black Sabbath album in the United Kingdom since Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973), and became an American Top 40 hit. Despite this, it was the first Black Sabbath album to fall short of RIAA certification.

The album received mixed reviews upon its release. AllMusic's Eduardo Rivadavia wrote that the album has "gone down as one of heavy metal's all-time greatest disappointments" and described "Zero the Hero", "Hot Line", and "Keep It Warm" as "embarrassing". Blender contributor Ben Mitchell gave the album one out of five stars and claimed that the music on Born Again was worse than its cover. Martin Charles Strong, the author of The Essential Rock Discography, wrote that it was "an exercise in heavy-metal cliché". However, PopMatters contributor Adrien Begrand has noted the album as "overlooked". The British magazine Metal Forces defined it "a very good album" even if "Gillan may not be the perfect frontman for the Sabs".