"Fairies Wear Boots" is a Black Sabbath song from their 1970 album Paranoid.
In the liner notes to Black Box: The Complete Original Black Sabbath (1970-1978), Tony Iommi states that the song title comes from when "Geezer and Ozzy were smoking cannabis outside and witnessed fairies in the park, running around wearing boots. As far as Tony knows, it didn't come from an attack from skinheads." Afterwards, they wrote the lyrics to "Fairies Wear Boots". Geezer Butler states in the documentary film "Classic Albums: Black Sabbath's Paranoid" that the song was indeed inspired by an encounter with skinheads, who the band members then derogatorily referred to as "fairies" for the song. The song contains an instrumental at the beginning, also reprised after the song's first chorus, called "Jack the Stripper".
An earlier version of "Fairies Wear Boots", taken from a session for the BBC's John Peel Sunday Show dated April 26, 1970, is on the bonus disc of the Ozzy Osbourne release The Ozzman Cometh..
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Famous quotes containing the words fairies, wear and/or boots:
“As I went forth early on a still and frosty morning, the trees looked like airy creatures of darkness caught napping; on this side huddled together, with their gray hairs streaming, in a secluded valley which the sun had not penetrated; on that, hurrying off in Indian file along some watercourse, while the shrubs and grasses, like elves and fairies of the night, sought to hide their diminished heads in the snow.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“The prince in disguise makes the most charming beggar in the world, no doubt; but that is because—as all fairy-tales from the beginning of time have taught us—the prince wears his rags as if they were purple. And, to do that, he not only must once have worn purple, but must never forget the purple that he has worn. And to the argument that all cannot wear purple, I can ... only reply that that seems to me to be no reason why all should wear rags.”
—Katharine Fullerton Gerould (1879–1944)
“Boots and shoes are the greatest trouble of my life. Everything else one can turn and turn about, and make old look like new; but there’s no coaxing boots and shoes to look better than they are.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)