I do like Am I Going Insane but it’s such an oddity, and a weird pick to represent the album, although it was done as a single so I guess I shouldn’t be surprised it ended up on a comp. It’s funny that it got permanently stuck with (Radio) as a subtitle when that was just a note someone wrote down for marketing purposes.

I think there are alot of people who think of Born Again, the album with Gillan, is a low point, but Babble always regarded the stuff that came after as being worse. But re “only the first 3 are any good and the rest suck,” they made another album with Dio in the ’90s (and then brought Tony Martin back!) and had that reunion in the 2000s where they toured and released an album as Heaven and Hell. Also, the first Tony Martin album, The Eternal Idol, is okay if you can’t get enough of Tony Iommi. The two albums after that are bottom of the barrel cheese metal, and then they two they did with him in the ’90s are just weak attempts to update the Tony Martin version of the band, which seems like a doomed concept. It’s surprising that they brought him back second time, since duing their first stint with him they had to cancel a significant number of shows on each of the three tours due to poor ticket sales.

Seventh Star, the album they made right after the one with Gillan, was supposed to be a Tony Iommi solo album, and Iommi still insists that it’s not a real Black Sabbath album and claims it as a solo album. Warner Bros. decided at the last minute that it had to be a Black Sabbath album “featuring Tony Iommi”.

Interestingly, this is the opposite of what happened to Ozzy, who planned to call his band “The Blizzard of Ozz” “featuring Ozzy Osbourne” but then Sharon changed that at the last minute, which pissed of the rest of the band.