“Trashed” by Black Sabbath

"Trashed" kicks off Born Again, Black Sabbath's 1983 album with Ian Gillan singing lead, and it went out as the record's first single, with a video. The story behind it is a wild one: Gillan took Bill Ward's car without asking and, fuelled by drink, went joyriding around the grounds of the studio until he hit a tyre, flipped, and skidded a long way upside down, stopping inches from the swimming pool. Then he wrote the lyrics about it.

Ward, whose car it was, never found it funny; having been through addiction to drink and drugs himself, he later said he'd rather not glamorize the episode. He's on drums here all the same, with Tony Iommi on guitar and Geezer Butler on bass, all four share the writing credit, and the band produced it with engineer Robin Black for Vertigo.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.