“Headless Cross” by Black Sabbath

"Headless Cross" is the title track of Black Sabbath's 1989 album, and the credits tell you exactly where the band stood by then: Tony Iommi on guitar, Tony Martin on his second album as the singer, the newly recruited Cozy Powell on drums, Geoff Nicholls on keyboards and Laurence Cottle on bass. Iommi, Martin and Powell wrote it, and Sean Lynch engineered and mixed.

It came out of a rough patch. Warner Bros. and Vertigo had both dropped the band after the poor sales of 1987's The Eternal Idol, and this was their first record for I.R.S., with Iommi producing the band himself for the first time since 1982 and Powell sharing the job. The album dives headlong into the dark stuff, the occult, Satanism and death, and critics went for it in a big way, some calling it the finest Black Sabbath album of all.

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