"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:
“Slowly ... the truth is dawning upon women, and still more slowly upon men, that woman is no stepchild of nature, no Cinderella of fate to be dowered only by fairies and the Prince; but that for her and in her, as truly as for and in man, life has wrought its great experiences, its master attainments, its supreme human revelations of the stuff of which worlds are made.”
—Anna Garlin Spencer (1851–1931)
“All of childhood’s unanswered questions must finally be passed back to the town and answered there. Heroes and bogey men, values and dislikes, are first encountered and labeled in that early environment. In later years they change faces, places and maybe races, tactics, intensities and goals, but beneath those penetrable masks they wear forever the stocking-capped faces of childhood.”
—Maya Angelou (b. 1928)
“It’s fine to be a great democrat when you’ve a slave to rub your boots on.”
—Christina Stead (1902–1983)