Electric Funeral

This song is about a nuclear holocaust. It's one of several songs on the Paranoid album with an apocalyptic tone.

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi explains that the band would often play any given song in lots of different ways, but once they recorded a version in the studio, any quirks and oddities of the recording dictated how they played it from then on. In his book Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath, Iommi writes, "When we recorded 'Electric Funeral'... Bill would play it differently every bloody time. He didn't know how many times to come in, and at certain parts he plays three instead of four. [in the studio] we kept the three. And to this day we still play it that way."