A-side "After Forever" | Recorded 1970 Length 6:14 | |
Released 18 September 1970 (Album)1971 (Single) Label Vertigo (Album)Warner Bros. (Single) | ||
"Fairies Wear Boots" is a song by the English heavy metal band Black Sabbath, from their 1970 album Paranoid. It was released in 1971 as the B-side to "After Forever".
Contents
Composition
In the 2010 documentary film Classic Albums: Black Sabbath's Paranoid, Geezer Butler states the music was inspired by the band's encounter with skinheads, who are the "fairies" in the song.
However, in the 2004 release of Black Box: The Complete Original Black Sabbath (1970–1978), Tony Iommi states the title was inspired from an incident when Geezer and Ozzy were smoking cannabis and saw fairies in boots running around a park, and not from an attack by skinheads. In Ozzy Osbourne's autobiography I Am Ozzy he stated he doesn't know what the song is about, but everybody told him he wrote the lyrics.
The song contains an instrumental intro entitled "Jack the Stripper".
Versions
An earlier version of "Fairies Wear Boots", taken from a session for the BBC's John Peel Sunday Show dated April 26, 1970, is on the bonus disc of the Ozzy Osbourne release The Ozzman Cometh.
The song also appears on the band's first compilation album, We Sold Our Soul for Rock 'n' Roll.