"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:
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Don’t ever wear artistic jewelry; it wrecks a woman’s reputation.”
—Colette [Sidonie Gabrielle Colette] (1873–1954)
“In the present age, alas! our pens are ravished by unlettered authors and unmannered critics, that make a havoc rather than a building, a wilderness rather than a garden. But, alack! what boots it to drop tears upon the preterit?”
—Aubrey Beardsley (1872–1898)