FOR 57 years, Tony Iommi has been Black Sabbath’s keeper of the flame.
He is “Master Of The Riffs” — some say he invented heavy metal — and he is the only band member to stay the course.
Heavy metal Black Sabbath in 1970, pictured Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne[/caption]
‘Master of the riffs’ Iommi[/caption]
“Everybody else has come and gone and come back,” the guitarist tells me in his soft Brummie tones. “I’ve been the constant one.”
Talking to the affable Iommi, 77, it’s hard to imagine that he’s responsible for some of rock’s darkest, dirtiest, most bone-crunching riffs.
Tomorrow, he and the rest of the original line-up face their final curtain.
It’s our last chance to hear Paranoid, War Pigs and Iron Man performed live by the four musicians who created them.
No doubt all eyes will be on the singer, the “Prince Of Darkness” himself.
Despite complaining to me recently that he has enough health issues “to fill a medical dictionary”, Ozzy Osbourne is set to give his hometown of Birmingham a hellraising last hurrah.
But let’s not forget that the Back To The Beginning extravaganza at Villa Park also marks the end of a journey for bassist Geezer Butler, drummer Bill Ward — and Iommi.
Sabbath are held in highest esteem by the bands that followed in their wake, hence an incredible supporting cast.
With Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello serving as musical director, there’s a blizzard of metal titans paying their dues.
Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, Alice In Chains, Sammy, Hagar, Steven Tyler (Aerosmith), Billy Corgan (Smashing Pumpkins), Duff McKagan and Slash (Guns N’ Roses), Fred Durst (Limp Bizkit) — the list goes on.
“It’s a great honour,” says Iommi. “I’m so proud of everyone who has come forward to support Sabbath.
“They’ve come from everywhere to be a part of something. This is a real one-off.”
Iommi is particularly chuffed that his old mucker Ward, who he first met at Birchfield Road School, is back in the Sabbath fold for the first time since 2005.
At school, I didn’t even know that Ozzy could sing
Iommi
“Bill and I were in a couple of bands before Sabbath,” he says, “and that’s when we went round to Ozzy’s house looking for a singer. It was how it all started.”
Seeing that the gig is called Back To The Beginning, I ask Iommi to sift through the mists of time to describe how the band came together.
He begins by giving me his first impressions of Ozzy before moving on to Geezer.
“At school, I didn’t even know that Ozzy could sing,” he says. “It was a racket at first, I must say, but after we’d been playing for a while, he got really good.”
As for the singer’s madcap behaviour, Iommi adds: “He got more loony as we went on. In the early days, we’d be on this little stage at a club or somewhere and we had this thing between us.
“If I broke a string, I’d shout to Ozzy, ‘Organise a raffle, organise a raffle!’ which meant, ‘Talk to the audience’.
“He wasn’t very good at that in the early days, he didn’t know what to say.
“But he got more and more confident and, eventually, he became like he is — very out front.”
Iommi moves on to Geezer and says: “Before Sabbath, Bill and I used to play these all-nighters at a place in Birmingham.
“I always remember seeing Geezer there, crawling up walls because of the drugs they were on in those days.
‘I made my fingertips’
“Me and Bill used to think, ‘Blimey, he’s mad, that guy’. Of course, when we got together with him, we realised he was very, very sensible.
“Geezer had never played bass before — he was a guitar player — but it was amazing how quickly he picked it up.”
So what about Iommi himself? “Originally, I wanted to play drums,” he replies, “but because of where we lived with my parents, you couldn’t get a drum kit in the house. It was so small.
“My mother bought me a guitar, one of these cheap £20 ones from a catalogue, and I sat in my room learning to play. I really enjoyed it.”
Then he adds with a self-deprecating chuckle: “And I’m still trying to learn to play the guitar!”
This was the early Sixties when one band in particular caught Iommi’s ear — The Shadows led by his guitar hero Hank Marvin.
The band now, from left Bill, Geezer, Ozzy and Tony ahead of their last gig[/caption]
“I used to listen to the Top 20 on my little radio,” he says.
“The Shadows really inspired me because I loved their sound and style.
“They were an instrumental band and it was great because I had something to learn and to relate to. Then I could go off and do my own thing.”
I thought that I’d become involved in the scene in some way and I didn’t expect to become a musician
Iommi
Iommi was also shaped by his tough upbringing in Aston.
Of the neighbourhood where he lived, he says: “It was rough and gang infested. You had to be careful walking round the streets because you’d get beaten up if you were in the wrong area.
“I started doing martial arts — judo and karate — purely to protect myself,” he continues.
“I went training three or four times a week.
“I thought that I’d become involved in the scene in some way and I didn’t expect to become a musician.”
Iommi recalls having “a dream of being on a stage, look-ing out, I always thought it was to do with martial arts but, of course, it wasn’t. I later realised it was about being on stage playing guitar”.
At 17, he had a horrific industrial accident which would have a profound effect on Black Sabbath’s signature heavy guitar sound.
While operating a guillotine press in a sheet-metal factory, Iommi lost the tips of the middle and ring fingers on his right hand.
He says: “I went to the hospital and they said, ‘You might as well forget playing the guitar’.
“I just couldn’t accept that attitude so I made my own fingertips with thimbles. I had to come up with a totally different way of playing.
“I also worked on the guitar all the time. I had it in bits and put it back together, trying to make it more comfortable to play.
“Eventually, that extended to experimenting with amplifiers, making a sound that would be more full.”
By the time Sabbath, originally known as Earth, got together in 1968, Iommi was on a mission to make a success of it despite financial hardships.
Black Sabbath’s Top Of The Pops performance[/caption]
“Oh God, I drove the bloody van!” he exclaims. “Unloaded the gear, played, drove back.
“We were hard up. We might make 15 quid and, on our way home, stop off and spend it all at a fish and chip shop.
“But it was great because we started from nothing and we went through the whole thing together.
“We became glued to each other, we lived in each other’s pockets, and it really made us a band.”
Iommi continues: “The name was Geezer’s idea after he watched a Boris Karloff film called Black Sabbath. It was appropriate for our music and it stuck.
“When we were Earth, we got misbooked because they thought we were a pop band. We absolutely died a death!”
An all-important step for Sabbath, like any up-and- coming act, was getting a record deal.
Iommi remembers how it happened: “We used to play at a club in Birmingham where Jim Simpson, who became our first manager, would get people to come down and see us.
“Of course 99 per cent of them said ‘no’ and one per cent said ‘yes’. We were playing something different. In those days, it was all soul, not our kind of music.”
The self-titled debut album contains the song Black Sabbath which bears Iommi’s first great riff.
He regards it as their breakthrough moment.
“That track hit home,” he says. “It was so different and we knew straight away, ‘That’s it, that’s what we want to do, that’s the benchmark’.”
‘Screaming girls’
Iommi took on a lot of the responsibility at the time, getting the others out of bed and into the studio by 9am.
“Everybody needs somebody to direct them,” he affirms. “Otherwise it turns into chaos.”
That first album, now regarded as a trailblazing triumph, landed to lukewarm reviews but it didn’t deter Iommi and his bandmates.
I always remember somebody — I won’t mention his name — came to review us. He left unknown to us and we DIDN’T play, but he still reviewed the show. What does that tell you?
Iommi
“Of course, you never want a bad review but you have to believe in what you do,” he says.
“If we did get a reasonably good review, we’d bloody faint, but we never lost that belief and that’s what made us stronger.
“I always remember somebody — I won’t mention his name — came to review us. He left unknown to us and we DIDN’T play, but he still reviewed the show. What does that tell you?”
Next came the album which propelled Sabbath to the stratosphere, Paranoid, with its iconic three-minute adrenaline rush of a title track.
Iommi says: “We never went to the States with the first album but Paranoid opened up America for us.”
And yet the song itself was almost an afterthought, as he explains.
“When we were finishing the album, we went out to get something to eat.
“The producer came out and said to me, ‘We need another track. We haven’t got enough tracks’. So I had to come up with Paranoid. I waited for the others to come back and played it to them.
“Geezer wrote some lyrics, the guys learnt the song and we recorded it there and then.
“It was supposed to be filler but it was the one that took off — and we ended up on Top Of The Pops.”
Appearing on the UK’s premier pop showcase went against everything Sabbath stood for in their quest “to be an album band taken seriously for our music”.
Iommi says: “It was funny. You’ve got people like Cilla Black and then us. Bloody odd combination, it was!
“And the last thing we wanted to do was attract screaming girls.”
After Paranoid, Sabbath were on a roll, producing a string of high-octane, high-quality albums — Master Of Reality (1971), Vol.4 (1972), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath (1973) and Sabotage (1975).
“For each album, we tried different things,” says Iommi. “On Master Of Reality, I started tuning down a bit to get an even heavier sound.
Appearing on the UK’s premier pop showcase went against everything Sabbath stood for in their quest ‘to be an album band taken seriously for their music’[/caption]
“The whole vibe on Vol. 4 was great. We went to Los Angeles where John du Pont was unfortunate enough to rent us his house.
“It was a fantastic place with a ballroom, swimming pools and, God, did we have some fun.”
It was only after ten years in the business that the wheels started to fall off for Sabbath, resulting in Ozzy’s exit.
“Obviously, drugs were involved,” says Iommi. “It got to a stage where Ozzy had lost interest. He’d go missing for a couple of days in Los Angeles — things like that.
“I was nominated to go to the record company and make all the excuses. We were coming up with riffs but it just wasn’t going anywhere.
“It got to a point where I had to say, ‘Look, we’ll have to replace Ozzy or break up’. At the time, it was best for both of us and Ozzy went off and did his own thing.”
Sabbath regrouped with Ronnie James Dio taking over on lead vocals, the first of a succession of singers.
Then, in the late Nineties, the original Sabbath reformed and toured until 2005.
Minus drummer Ward, they got back together for the Rick Rubin-produced 13 (released in 2013) and played live again until 2017.
Now, eight years on, Sabbath are making their last stand.
They’ve all had well-documented health issues but Iommi and Ozzy see the funny side.
Ozzy even called himself “Iron Man” after surgeons inserted bolts in his neck following a fall at his home in the outskirts of Los Angeles
“He should be called the Six Million Dollar Man,” laughs Iommi. “I hear from him every few days and we complain to each other.
“We’ve all had problems so it’s quite an achievement for us to get on stage again after so many years.
“We’ll do the gig – then we’ll probably keel over!”
