The final Black Sabbath album with Tony Martin and by far the worst received. Released in the mid-90s, when most of the metal genre was going through a tough time, both commercially and critically (with some notable exceptions of course), the album features some additional vocals by the rapper Ice-T on the first track. Almost everyone who worked on it called it terrible, with Tony Iommi even saying that it should have been forbidden.
Well Forbidden is… I want to say crap, but it’s actually not. The songs worked really well in rehearsals, and then things started to get political, and I got wind of an Ozzy reunion – not from Sabbath directly, of course. But before that came, there was a meeting at the Sabbath offices in London to which we were summoned to discuss the possibility of doing a Run-D.M.C. type of album. I thought it wouldn’t work, and voiced that. Cozy Powell thought it wouldn’t work. I was never sure that most of the others were convinced, but we were kinda steered into a “Rap Sabbath” album. Then I was told that Ice-T was gonna be doing it and they couldn’t or wouldn’t tell me if he was doing the whole thing or just one track… and I still didn’t know the answer to that when I was in the studio singing the tracks. They said they were gonna take it and see what Ice-T wanted to do. So it has a distinct ill feeling about it. The album eventually didn’t really work, although some fans love it. And it was the penultimate album to my being removed from the band, the last album to be released being Sabbath Stones, a compilation album, which kept my name in the band to span 10 years and six albums.
It was the filler album that got the band out of the label deal, rid of the singer, and into the reunion.