"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..
Read more about Fairies Wear Boots: Cover Versions
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)
“We never really are the adults we pretend to be. We wear the mask and perhaps the clothes and posture of grown-ups, but inside our skin we are never as wise or as sure or as strong as we want to convince ourselves and others we are. We may fool all the rest of the people all of the time, but we never fool our parents. They can see behind the mask of adulthood. To her mommy and daddy, the empress never has on any clothes—and knows it.”
—Frank Pittman (20th century)
“Where are his boots?... Put his boots on, Klute, and his gunbelt and his spurs.”
—Willis Goldbeck (1900–1979)