Tony Iommi on Black Sabbath’s Heaven and Hell Cover, “Lynn Curlee’s cover artwork was originally inspired by a 1928 photograph”

“Black Sabbath’s ninth studio album, “Heaven and Hell” was released on April 18th in 1980. Did you know that Lynn Curlee’s cover artwork was originally inspired by a 1928 photograph of women dressed as angels smoking backstage during a college Christmas pageant? The portraits of the band that appeared on the back cover were drawn by Harry Carmean.”

Black Sabbath’s *Heaven and Hell* came out of a rough period for the band, but it ended up reviving them in a major way. Tony Iommi said that once Ronnie James Dio came into the picture, “we just fell into a groove,” and he added that with Dio, “we had a really good idea” of where the songs were headed. Iommi also said the band recorded “very fast,” and that the whole process “went so smoothly” compared with the increasingly chaotic sessions they had grown used to. The album was cut in the autumn of 1979 at Criteria Studio in Miami, along with Studios Ferber in Paris, and Iommi said the first song he and Dio wrote together was “Children of the Sea,” while the first one they recorded was the title track, “Heaven and Hell”. Iommi has also said the album felt like a fresh start, with Dio opening up more musical options than Sabbath had before, and that they knew when it was finished that “it was something special”.