BLACK SABBATH's BILL WARD: 'I Never Played 'Paranoid' The Same Way Twice'

During Bill Ward's June show on LA Radio Sessions with Mike Stark, the BLACK SABBATH drummer spoke about "Spiral Architect", the epic closing track on the band's fifth studio album, 1973's "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath". Known for its complex arrangements, Tony Iommi's acoustic guitar, and Ozzy Osbourne's soaring vocals, the song's lyrics tackle themes of retaining personal meaning in a surreal, modern world. Ward said  (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): "'Spiral Architect' live was brilliant to play. We had these huge orchestrational things… So I just loved everything about 'Spiral Architect'. It was one of my favorite songs. At the time when we wrote it, 'Spiral Architect', I thought, was very adventurous musically. I love how we had a rock song that had almost classical production. We had the timpani, which pronounced and accented with Tony, and Terry's [Geezer Butler] bass. Something about it's very gothic to me. It's just absolutely pinnacle metal. I think what's beautiful about it is that it can still be metal. However, I can feel how our band was changing, but it never lost its bottom roots. It never lost its roots where it came from, which was this very hard and unforgiving sound. And it still kept all of that encapsuled in 'Spiral Architect'. Lyrically, it kept it intact."

Bill continued: "I love the fact that the band would take risks and would be orchestrational with this song. I think that there, are pauses, there are slower parts where we became as bold as to write 'for all the things upon this earth' or whatever the lyrics were at that time. I must be honest, if I'm gonna tell everybody's secrets, I wrote those lyrics myself, and they made it into the song. And I'm not saying that to embolden myself. I couldn't really give a fuck, but I'm just saying that the way that it all fitted together was, for me, capsulated, capitalized a time and a place where I think we were all traveling through.

"You have to remember that this was about the third or fourth album, and we were very tired," Ward explained." We had been playing nonstop around the world. We hadn't stopped. We hadn't taken a break except to use the bathroom and have lunch. And other than that, we just kept rocking and rolling.

"I just love this song," Bill added.

Asked if "Spiral Architect" was a song that BLACK SABBATH would play live a lot, Bill said: "Yes. Yeah, we played it live. It was in the show for a long time."

As for whether "Spiral Architect" was difficult to play live, considering all of the movement changes in the song, Bill said: "No, it was great to play live. It was exceptionally wonderful to play live. For me, I just played hats to start it out, and then just moved around the drum kit. There's plenty of room for me. And Geezer was making huge pronunciations of bass, almost orchestrally. And Tony, he had so much room to do all kinds of things. He was playing almost acoustically, but electronically, and at the same time he was still playing huge power chords. He'd add everything. And Ozzy's lamenting voice capsulized the whole song. It's a brilliant song. I love that song. We allowed jam on the song a little bit. We did that with other songs. We're having a conversation right now about it, how much we moved that around and how much improvisation we put into the song. But sometimes Tony would start it differently. We would have a segment where he would play a classical piece before it. And that could change overnight."

After Stark noted that "Spiral Architect" "left a lot of room for improvisation", Bill clarified: "Sometimes at the very beginning, but in the song itself we would have to play tight. Sometimes on the very end, we would jam out on the end, so that was another improvisation place where we could do... Even on the record we improvised. That was improvisation at the very end of the song. That was in when we recorded it. But we actually had to play our parts as they were originally played. But there was room for improvisation, yeah."

Asked if there were other songs that in the SABBATH set that were really open to improvisation, Bill said: "Absolutely… Well, most of our show was improvisation, when I think about it. As you know, Tony would go into big-league guitar solos. That was one of the things that in the show [took up] sometimes up to 40 minutes. At first we were doing nearly two-and-a-half hour sets, or even longer. So it wasn't unusual for... Back then a guitar solo was a big thing to look forward to. It still is. It was difficult to put into a song where we knew where we were going in all the parts, where improvisation wasn't really allowed. But we did have songs where — and I'm trying to think of them and my memory's failing me — we did have songs where we were allowed to fall out, where the song would break out, break off, and where we allowed drum solos or guitar solos or bass solos, depending on what that might be."

When Stark said that some bands "get out on a stage and they play the record that they made in the studio note for note", Bill said: "Oh, we changed up things all the time like that. I never played 'Paranoid' the same way twice. I wouldn't know how to. But I tried to stay in the pocket on most of the stuff. As a drummer, I tried to keep it in the pocket as how we originally did it. But some nights it's just, like, 'What the hell, I'm gonna put this in.'"

Bill's show will air on June 13, 2026 on KLBP.org.

The original lineup of BLACK SABBATH — Ward, Osbourne, Iommi and Butler — played its final concert last summer. Dubbed "Back To The Beginning", the charity show was held at Villa Park in Birmingham, United Kingdom on July 5, 2025.

"Accountable Beasts", Ward's first solo album in 18 years, was released in 2015 via iTunes. The CD featured Ward's drumming on seven of the album's nine tracks, as well as contributions from Bill's longtime collaborators Keith Lynch (guitar, keyboards),Paul Ill (bass) and Ronnie Ciago (drums),alongside drummer Walter Earl and an array of session singers, including Ward's daughter Emily.

Ward in May 2012 announced that he was declining to join his former SABBATH bandmates for its scheduled dates, as well as the recording of the new album, due to a contractual dispute. After SABBATH shot down producer Rick Rubin's suggestion to replace Ward with Ginger Baker (CREAM) ("I thought, 'Bloody hell?'" Iommi told Rolling Stone magazine. "I just couldn't see that.") for the LP recording sessions, Rick suggested RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE drummer Brad Wilk.

Ozzy told The Pulse Of Radio during SABBATH's last tour that Ward was not in shape to participate. "Bill Ward has got the most physically demanding job of the lot of us, 'cause he's the timekeeper," he said. "I don't think personally he had the chops to pull it off, you know. The saddest thing is that he needed to own up to that, and we could have worked around it, whether we had a drummer on the side with him or something."

It was rumored that SABBATH wanted to bring a second drummer on the road to share duties with Ward, something that Iommi confirmed in 2017 during a question-and-answer session about SABBATH's "Ten Year War" box set.