TONY IOMMI
Black Sabbath’s Riff Lord remembers high times, low frequencies and a ton of hiring and firing. Plus, the spooky “fifth member” of the classic Sabbath line-up: “The Over-Self”…
‘‘ IWAS MEANT TO BE IN THE STUDIO LAST week and then things all went a bit pearshaped,” says Tony Iommi. Just like everyone else, the Black Sabbath guitarist has been navigating the pandemic in the best way he can. “It really is mad,” he says of a world plunged into chaos worthy of a Sabbath lyric. “Sometimes you do wonder what’s going to happen next.”
Dividing his time between homes in the Midlands and Dorset while his band’s business ticks over in the shape of deluxe reissues of second album Paranoid this past October and 1972’s Volume 4 this coming February, Iommi has been working on new music, revisiting a stockpile of riffs untapped since his pioneering, intermittently notorious group decided to call it a day in 2017.
For Black Sabbath, that final run brought to an end a story that began in the backstreets of Aston, Birmingham, in 1968, where Iommi, drummer Bill Ward, bass player Geezer Butler and frontman Ozzy Osbourne first threw in their lots together in a bid for a life less ordinary. Due to managerial machinations, Ward was absent for the band’s last studio album, 13 (Number 1 in the UK and US upon release in 2013), and the ensuing world tour.
Iommi, meanwhile, dealt with the recording of the album and the subsequent trek as he battled cancer, having been diagnosed with lymphoma in 2012. It was, says the 72-year-old of his treatment, “quite difficult to deal with at times.”
Iommi’s characteristic stoicism and determination were forged aged 17, when he lost the tips of his middle and ring fingers on his right hand in a sheet metal accident [see MOJO 235]. Unwilling to give up on a career in music, he switched to playing guitar lefthanded and captained Sabbath through the next five decades of dramatic escapades, embracing highs (including Olympian levels of intoxication) and lows (including the moment Sabbath strode on-stage beneath a miniature version of Stonehenge with Ian Gillan as their singer) and thrilling music that articulated horror both real and theatrical, at frequencies low enough to rearrange human cell structures. Iommi is one of few musicians arguably responsible for spawning an entire genre – in his case, heavy metal – but you won’t hear such claims from him. “I’m not a very technical player,” he tells MOJO today. “What I do is quite simple compared to other people.”
Iommi’s ability to invent monolithic riffs has sustained his group and inspired acolytes across a range of rock styles, from psych to metal, grunge to drone. Yet as we head back to the man’s childhood in Park Lane, Aston, the only son of Italian Catholic parents, we find his musical journey had an unlikely start.
Your first instrument wasn’t a guitar was it?
No, it was the accordion. My family in general – my father, relations and whatnot – played accordion and drums, with a bit of piano, so I just ended up playing it. I wasn’t mad about it but I did keep that accordion for years. In fact, I got rid of the
original one and then went and bought another one, as silly as that seems! I played that one for about a week and then never touched it again.
So what was the first piece of music that turned you on to guitar?
Rock’n’roll stuff initially. Chuck Berry and people like that. But The Shadows were a huge influence – largely because they were an instrumental band so you could learn those tunes easily. It was harder with Chuck Berry because you had to be able to sing too. With The Shadows you could just concentrate on the guitar.
As a teenager was the guitar an escape?
It probably was an escape at the time and it was something that I could focus my mind on. I went to judo lessons and karate lessons when I was young and that kept me focused and I was really into that. As soon as I started playing, the guitar just took over. In those days you weren’t really allowed out much or you’d join a gang, and that wasn’t for me, so it led to me sitting alone in my room and learning the guitar and learning songs I’d hear on the radio.
What other music did you gravitate towards?
It was a mixture of stuff. When I made my first appearance I was too young to even drink in a pub but we played in a pub garden. I’d never played in front of anybody at that point so it was quite nerve-wracking. That was my first appearance with that band and my last because they were all a lot older than me. Soon afterwards I joined a band with Bill Ward. We started playing Shadows tunes, more rock’n’roll and Top 20 stuff. You just had to know those Top 20 tunes or you wouldn’t get a gig. We’d play Otis Redding songs, a bit of Buddy Holly and whatever was popular. I have to say that I can’t actually remember what was even in the Top 20 at that time. Did I learn anything from it? Probably.
All four members of Sabbath grew up near each other in Aston. You came together to form Earth – but it was almost by default. That’s true. It was really strange, the way in which we got together. Bill and I were in a band, The Rest – a Birmingham band. Then I moved up to Carlisle to join this other band [Mythology] and I got Bill in. When that band split we came back and started looking for a singer. We’d seen Geezer floating about. He was in this other band [Rare Breed] that used to play this all-nighter club where Bill and I also played. To us, Geezer was a right freak, doing his acid or whatever and climbing the walls. I used to see him walking past my mum’s shop in Aston because he dated a girl who lived up the road, so that was as far as we knew each other.
Then one day Ozzy and Geezer came round to my house looking for a drummer. I said to them, “Bill’s a drummer.” But Bill said: “I don’t want to play with them, I want to do something with you.” I said, “Why don’t we have a go together?” and it went from there. We ended up rehearsing in a garden or somewhere. Geezer had never played bass in his life. He had a Telecaster that he’d tuned down to play bass. Me and Bill had come from a band that was quite good and we looked at each other after that rehearsal and said, “What are we doing? Nobody knows what they’re doing here!” But it was amazing how quickly it actually did come together after that, and how quickly Geezer picked up the bass.
You left Earth in late ’68 to join Jethro Tull for a few weeks and lasted long enough to appear with them in The Rolling Stones Rock’n’Roll Circus alongside Clapton, Lennon, Marianne Faithfull et al. What was that experience like?
It was a bit daunting, frightening but exciting. I’d seen all these people on TV but obviously I’d never met them so I was thrown into the deep end. Not having my band around me was weird because I didn’t know the guys in Jethro
Tull that well. Before we did the show the Stones had a reception at a hotel in London and they were playing, and all the people in the film were there. Good God! I was like a fish out of water. I’ll always remember Marianne Faithfull coming over and saying, “Oh, don’t worry, everything will be all right,” because she could obviously see that I was shitting myself! She was very nice, the one who got me to relax.
As we rehearsed [with Tull] and we had a couple of days doing the movie, I got to know people. We were sharing a dressing room with The Who. I slowly started to feel like I was part of something and, looking back, it was a pretty fantastic experience.
You decided that Tull was not for you but you learned the art of discipline from your time with them, didn’t you?
That’s right. I’d been around a band that was very different but knew what they needed to do. I saw that, learnt from that, and Geezer saw that too, because he came down to rehearsals. When we got back together it was clear that we really needed to take things seriously in order to make things work, so we did.
Earth changed their name to Black Sabbath at the point when you wrote the song of the same name. How did it come to you?
You know what, it’s hard to explain. Geezer and myself were playing around just making a noise really and that riff just came out. It just came together and I’m not sure we knew what was happening. It was almost as if something had been pushed into your hand at that point. We knew that song was completely different from what was out there and nothing sounded like it. It gave us an incredible feeling. We thought, “We love this!” It made the hairs on your arms stand up and we said, “That’s it! That’s where we want to be, that’s where we’re going.”
Is Sabbath’s wall of sound based on you and Geezer interlocking – essentially playing the same riff?
Yeah. It’s the combination of everybody, of course, but the combination of Geezer and myself in particular because he would solidify the riff – whether he was playing the same riff or playing an accompaniment by bending the strings in a way that would make the riff fatter. Both of us developed this approach to bending the strings to make the sound fuller and that became our sound.
The band’s first album famously took one day to record. During the sessions you had to switch from playing a Fender Stratocaster to a Gibson SG – a guitar that has come to define you. How important is the SG to your sound?
Pretty important. We’d just finished recording Wicked World, the first track for the album, when the pick-up on my Strat went. I shat myself because it was my main guitar. I couldn’t pull the Strat to bits to rebuild because we only had a day in the studio so I had to use the SG.
Originally, I’d had a right-handed SG and I swapped it in a car park for a left-handed SG with a guy I didn’t know from Adam! (laughs) That was quite weird, I suppose. I’d never really played the SG because I was so used to the Strat but I took it with me to the studio and when the Strat went I had to use it. Of course, I was right in the deep end again, recording our first album with a guitar I’d never really played. But I never looked back or went back to the Strat after that.
You were raised a Catholic. So how did your parents react when the first album came out and you had a huge inverted cross on the inside of the gatefold sleeve and all the occult connotations?
Oh, God! In all honesty I think the one who had the hardest job was Geezer because his family were staunch Catholics. As far as my parents were concerned it was more of a case of,
“When are you going to get a proper job?” I think when the first record came out it was still a case of, “Oh, my God, you’ve made a record… Now when are you going to get a proper job?” (laughs) To be fair, my mum did help us a lot. She helped sign for our first van. And when the first album came out they were obviously proud but they never really let on.
The critics hated Sabbath from day one, and your music was labelled ‘heavy metal’. How did you feel about that term?
It never existed in my mind for many years.
I didn’t understand it and I didn’t really care for labels anyway. If I was going to define what we did back then, I would’ve classed us as a heavy rock band. I never really accepted the term ‘heavy metal’ to be honest, none of us did. In the end it didn’t really matter. It became a simple way of describing what we do. As far as we were concerned, we just liked what we were doing. We weren’t trying to follow any kind of path that had been laid for us because there was nothing there that sounded like that before us. We started writing this stuff and it just seemed to come out of the air somehow, you know.
A lot of musicians talk about not feeling in control of the creative process. Is that how you were feeling?
“We always felt there was a fifth member – this presence when we were all together.”
We always felt within the band that there was a fifth member. It sounds ridiculous now, but we always felt that there was somebody overlooking us and guiding us. We felt this presence when we were all together. It was one of those things we’d refer to as being the over-self, or the fifth member, looking out for us. We were so close as a band, we lived in each other’s pockets from the start, that we became as one. This fifth member seemed very real and there to us.
Things always seemed to happen to us that were quite weird. We’d be in the van, for example, and one of us would look out the window and go, “Oh look, there’s a fish and chip shop over there,” and just as we’d say that, the lights would go out in the shop. There were just always strange things happening to us back then.
Weirdness aside, how do you view the musical development of the band between the first album and Vol. 4?
The press weren’t big fans, so the only way we could get to people was to go out and play. When we started releasing albums, that changed – especially when we released the Paranoid album [September 1970] and we went to America. People started to accept us properly there and we went from there. The shows got bigger and we became a better band. We became closer and tighter. In terms of our playing, it was that simple.
Vol. 4 was when your cocaine madness set in.
Yeah. But it was also a great time for us, really. We were in our own little bubble. We rented [paint empire mogul] John du Pont’s house in LA and we had the time of our lives. We rehearsed there and wrote the album there. We were getting drugs and stuff brought
in, and it was just a great time. The problem with it was we tried to recreate the same situation for the next album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and it didn’t work at all.
You went from smoking weed in 1969 to taking cocaine in 1973. Did that excess lead to the split of the original line-up?
Well, we went through a great, jolly period at first and I didn’t start taking coke until much later, really. Vol. 4 was probably the height of it all, though, and after that things didn’t feel quite the same. I loved Sabbath Bloody Sabbath but after that I think we struggled. The drug thing around the later period with Ozzy sort of took over. We went through a bad stage pretty much until we got Ronnie [James Dio] in the band. I think we all lost track of things. I know Ozzy suffered. He didn’t feel right with things any more, and neither did anyone else.
Do you think the tales of excess mask the personal cost that came with being in Black Sabbath?
Yeah. There was nobody there to tell us not to do drugs. Everybody and their brother was doing coke, especially in America. I won’t mention any names, but you’d meet people who were high up in government and stuff and you’d find out that they were doing coke. Bloody hell! It just became this thing suddenly. It was almost like going out to the pub. At the end of the day, there was a downside and it affected us all.
In April ’79 Ozzy was fired and Sabbath continued with Ronnie James Dio. What did he bring to the band?
He brought a lot, a freshness for starters. And it was the same for Ozzy too. He had a fresh start and he had to get himself together. With us, with Ronnie, it made us work. He was a fresh voice and it was exciting again. We’d reached where we were going to reach with that [original] line-up at that time. That last tour we did [for 1978’s Never Say Die!] was when we had Van Halen opening for us and, if I’m honest really, we were old hat by then compared to them.
You were very generous to Van Halen on that tour. Most headliners would’ve felt threatened.
They were just great, such an energetic band. They’d go on and jump around, do somersaults and all that stuff, and then we’d come on and
(sings a doomy Sabbath-style riff ) and bring the whole place down! (laughs) But we’d reached where we’d reached and we’d lost something on the way. We had to do something because we were either going to break up or Ozzy was going to leave and we’d get a new singer in and do something slightly different. If we hadn’t done that, we’d have been finished and I didn’t think we should finish. When Ronnie came on board we had something to prove again. It wasn’t just handed to us on a plate any more. Of course, at the time, we had Don Arden managing us and he was really against us getting Ronnie
“Don Arden said, ‘You can’t have a midget fronting Black Sabbath!’ He wasn’t having it.”
in the band, so that made it even more difficult.
Why was that?
He turned round and said, “You can’t have a midget fronting Black Sabbath!” Those were his words. He wasn’t having it and told us we were going to get Ozzy back. That was when we basically split from him over that whole situation.
Between 1980 and 1982 you released two studio albums with Ronnie, Heaven And Hell and Mob Rules – records that some people describe as their favourite Sabbath albums. How do you feel about them?
I almost want to agree with those people. The first period of Sabbath was great and what we did is set in stone, but when we did Heaven And Hell, I just really loved that record. I loved Mob Rules too. I loved the energy we’ve got on those albums. The way Ronnie put things over gave us a kick up the arse too. We were able to sit down together properly and put ideas together. The way his voice sounded was great. I loved that whole period. It was frightening and exciting at the same time because everyone seemed against us. Everyone kept on saying, “You can’t do this, it’s never going to happen without Ozzy,” but we liked what we’d got and we were right about that too.
Dio left in late ’82 after a clash of egos during the mixing of Live Evil album. Ian Gillan joined for the Born Again album, which led to the Stonehenge moment…
And what a moment that was! (laughs) You would never have thought that Ian would end up in the band and he didn’t remember very much about joining the band either! The priceless moment was when his manager rang him up and said, “Ian, if you’re going to make managerial decisions, could you let me know?” It was quite a strange time, I suppose.
After that there were endless Sabs’ line-up changes with ex-band members leaving and then re-joining. It almost turned into a soap opera, didn’t it?
I suppose so, especially looking at it now. But at the time all I wanted to do was play and have a band that worked. So every time someone left, I’d bring someone new in. It was the same as most workplaces: if someone leaves, you don’t just close the whole factory down, you get somebody else in. That’s how I looked at it and, yes, it wasn’t the same as the original line-up because it couldn’t be. But you brought new people in, not to replace the others, but just to carry on.
Much has been made of the bad blood between you and the original band members down the years. And yet, having stood in a room with all four of you, you almost seem like the same four people you were back in ’69.
You’re exactly right. That is exactly it. When we got together to do the last album [2013’s 13] and Bill was on board originally, we were rehearsing at my house and then Ozzy’s house, and it was just like old times. The banter was there and we were playing up and doing all the things we’d always done. We were all one again, and then of course it all didn’t happen because it’s such a complicated situation. Things always get more complicated in that way.
Bill didn’t re-join the band at that time, and you played your final shows in 2017 without him. Did it feel right to end Sabbath then?
Basically, it was probably my fault. We were having late nights and flying all the time. I can’t complain about that because we had great hotels and the best of everything, but it was making me tired and when I spoke to my cancer professor he said, “You shouldn’t be doing this to this extent.” I started to worry constantly. I felt I had to draw the line somewhere because we couldn’t tour forever and then start writing a new album to tour again. We were getting to that age where it was just too much. I loved being with the band and doing gigs but I hated the loneliness of the rest of it. When you get to the hotel and you’ve got a day off, you don’t know what to do because sometimes you just can’t go out because there are fans around or you just don’t feel like going out. It’s easy to get locked into your own little world.
You’re writing new music now. What does it sound like?
Shit! (laughs) There’s so much stuff that I’ve got that I want to put down. We’ve got eight songs that we want to get drums on because they’re programmed drums at the moment… but things have got in the way (laughs). And I’ve got hundreds of other riffs that I like so I want to do something with them.
Black Sabbath is over, so will this become a solo project?
I don’t know. I will need a singer but I don’t know where we’ll go from here or who we’re going to use or what to do other than get the musical side together. Mainly I’ve been doing it for my own peace of mind, to see what things sound like. They are quite different songs, some may need orchestration. They might suit different vocalists but we’ll see, because, honestly, I feel a bit lost right now with it all.
Finally, what is there left to accomplish for Tony Iommi?
I don’t really know what’s left to do. I play because I enjoy it and I can do things when I like. I don’t have to work towards getting a tour together or anything. I’m not trying to take the world by storm. I’m still just trying to make music that I like. It’s how it’s been since day one.