Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  When Ian first joined us he said: ‘I don’t know what to wear.’

  I said: ‘Everybody wears black or maybe leather.’

  ‘I don’t really wear leather.’

  It’s a bit difficult singing in Black Sabbath with flowery shirts on, so we asked him to darken down a bit. Had about five or six waistcoats made, all black leather, and in the end he had some leather pants as well. We were actually getting him there bit by bit.

  On 13 September we were due to play a bullring in Barcelona. We were invited to this really nice club the night before. The drinks were flowing and then Ian decided that he was going to set the waiter’s arse on fire. He got his lighter going while the guy was serving somebody else, burning him on the backside. I thought, here we go, and said to Bev: ‘I’m going to go back to the hotel now.’

  He said: ‘I’ll come with you.’

  But Ian went: ‘Just hang on, we’re all coming with you in a minute.’

  ‘Oh, fucking hell. Well, okay, all right.’

  We had another drink and then the place closed, so we went. Ian walked out with his pint of beer and they said: ‘You can’t take that outside.’

  He did anyway and then it was: ‘Don’t push me!’

  And bang! A fight started and it was an awful one. They came from everywhere, all the kitchen staff, the waiters, the bloody lot, with knives and martial arts nunchucks and everything. We were just the band and two security blokes. We were fighting for our lives and Ian Gillan was nowhere to be seen. He later claimed he fell in a ditch, but I reckon he legged it. Geezer hit somebody with a glass and it cut his hand open. The police came and they arrested him and one of our security guys. They put them in jail and threw two people from the club in with them, who proceeded to beat our security guy up right there.

  How on earth we got back to the hotel I don’t know. Then we tried to get a call out to Don Arden, but the hotel had been phoned by the club and they blocked our calls. We all went: ‘Oh, God. Now what?’

  They threw us out of the hotel, because they had ties with this club. The Mafia were involved in that; it was a heavy scene. We got on the tour bus and tried to find somewhere to stay, but nobody would have us. We drove for ages and ages and somehow we ended up staying about a hundred yards from where we were originally. We managed to get Don on the phone and he said: ‘I’ll send somebody over.’

  He arranged this team of eight German heavies to come over. And, sure enough, in the middle of the night, straight away, boom, there they were. The head guy was older, grey hair, glasses, very well dressed, and he said: ‘Just stay in the rooms and don’t move. I’ll go and see them.’

  Don had told me: ‘This man is very serious.’

  Supposedly he had killed such and such a number of people and I thought, oh fuck, we don’t want to get into that! So I said to him: ‘God, sort it out but don’t go there. Please don’t make it any worse than it already is.’

  He said: ‘They’ll listen to me.’

  He was a lovely guy and I got along fine with him, but it was like something you’d see in a movie. We played the bullring on the night and I thought, oh dear, we’re in the open air, we messed with the wrong people, we’re going to get murdered! But the Germans went around all the entrances and all the dressing rooms and secured the whole place. They were real professionals.

  The worst of it was, we had a guy from the Daily Mail travelling around with us. He saw all this and reported it all in the paper. He came in to do some photographs and a little story about playing in the bullring, but he got a lot more than that.

  In October we took the whole Stonehenge thing to America. We had carpenters on it and a big crew to set it all up, but on most gigs it just wouldn’t work. The columns at the back were too high and we ended up just using the ones that held my and Geezer’s cabinets, but even those were massive. At the end of the tour we tried to give it all away to the people who had bought London Bridge and reassembled it in Arizona, but they didn’t want it. We couldn’t take it back to England, so the crew dumped it off at the docks somewhere and left it. Just ridiculous. We abandoned Stonehenge right there in America.

  I didn’t see the movie Spinal Tap until later. Don Arden said to me: ‘We’ve got a front cover to do tomorrow.’

  I said: ‘Okay. Me and Geezer?’

  ‘With Spinal Tap.’

  ‘Spinal Tap? Who the bloody hell is Spinal Tap?’

  I don’t think even he knew at the time.

  ‘I think it’s some up-and-coming band and they have a movie coming out.’

  ‘And we are doing a front cover with them? We’ve never heard of them!’

  Me and Geezer did the shoot with them anyway, which was funny, but I still didn’t have the faintest idea who they were. It was only later when I saw the movie that I realised what it was all about and where they got the idea for the scene with the tiny Stonehenge from.

  And they had a midget as well.

  Because the Born Again album cover had a picture of this red baby with claws and little devil’s horns, Don Arden’s idea was to recreate this baby on stage. So one night at a gig he said: ‘I want to show you something.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He made Ian and me wait outside this room and finally said: ‘Okay, you can come in now.’

  We went in, it was dark and we just saw these red eyes, peering at us.

  ‘Blimey!’

  We put the light on and there was this midget in a rubber outfit who looked like the baby on the cover. We thought, fucking hell, Don’s gone over the top! He said: ‘It’s going to be a great addition to the show!’

  The idea was that the midget would climb up the 13-foot-high columns, run across them, and then jump off them on to the drum riser, which was about halfway down the stage. And then he’d jump off the riser to the front of the stage, look at the audience, cry, and his eyes would light up and the show would start.

  The midget was a bit of a pop star, because he’d been one of the little bears in Star Wars. Ozzy at the time also took a midget out on the road; I think he called him Ronnie. I don’t know who had the first one, really. It became a thing. Midgets were in demand. But we had the most famous midget because ours was in Star Wars.

  ‘Who’s got the most famous midget?’

  ‘We have!’

  He kept ribbing the crew with it: ‘I’ve been in the movies!’

  They really didn’t care about that at all, so they did all manner of things to this poor guy. One night they locked him in a flight case.

  ‘What’s happened to the midget?’

  Nobody could find him. The little guy nearly suffocated.

  Then another day I went down for a sound check and I could hear: ‘Help! Help!’

  I looked up and they had him hanging over the stage on a chain, upside down. The poor bugger, he really took some stick. It was becoming a real thing for the crew: ‘What can we do to him next?’

  We finally decided it was best for all parties concerned if he left, especially after the crew decided to put the lights out on him at the very moment that he jumped from the columns on to the drum riser. He went: ‘Aaaaaah!’

  Splat!

  He caught the edge of the drum riser and nearly broke his neck. Meanwhile, we were backstage waiting to come on and it just blew the show. We said: ‘That’s it, he’s gone!’

  They would have killed him if we hadn’t fired him.

  Up until that point I had always worked with people who were completely committed. Looking back at it now, it doesn’t look as if Ian was. I think he had a ball and did his best, but he knew all along that he was going to get out. And we never thought, oh, he’s going to be here for ten years. With this line-up we just set out to see where it was going. We did one album, toured for a year and that was it. We didn’t know until the very end that Ian was going back to Deep Purple, but it had run its course by that point. Being with Purple, that was his gig. We didn’t really think about doing another album together, we never had fights,
we got on great and we still do. We had a fantastic time and more laughs than ever. We just took it day by day. And the last of those days came in March 1984, when we had our final gig together in Massachusetts.

  That was the end for Ian, and for Bev as well.

  58

  Last man standing

  Right after Ian Gillan left, we met up with Ozzy to talk about getting the old band back together again. We’ve had one or two times like that, where we discussed him coming back. If it had been up to us, it would have happened. But Don wouldn’t have anything to do with Sharon and Sharon wouldn’t have anything to do with Don. It was always these stupid managements beefing on about something that stopped us from doing what we wanted to do.

  We still needed a new singer, so out in LA me and Geezer listened to tapes again, boxes and boxes of them, sent to us by all these young guys who were dreaming about joining Black Sabbath. This one guy called Ron Keel sent a tape in and I said to Geezer: ‘This lad’s pretty good. Have a listen to him.’

  He played it and said: ‘Oh, yeah!’

  We went out for dinner and drinks with him. In the course of the evening I said to Ron: ‘I really like the stuff you sent.’

  ‘Oh, thanks.’

  I said: ‘I like that third track, so-and-so . . .’

  And he went: ‘That’s not me.’

  ‘What do you mean it’s not you? It’s on your tape!’

  He said: ‘I’m on the other side.’

  He’d sent the tape with him on one side and another, different singer on the other. So we made a right boo-boo there. Ron actually did have a career later, because he’s a good singer as well. He just wasn’t what we were looking for at the time. We never figured out who the other guy was, but after this happened we’d had enough, so we got a producer to try out the singers who had sent in good tapes. It’s like doing The X Factor: you go through all these kids who sing in the bathroom and think they are great. Most of them were rubbish.

  We wanted somebody who looked right, had a good voice and could sing the old songs, because that’s what people wanted to hear as well. When Ronnie James Dio came into it, he was so different from Ozzy, but he could still sing those old songs in his way and it sounded right. Most of the people we tried just didn’t sound right. A lot of them couldn’t reach the high notes. Come to think of it, that was one of the things Michael Bolton actually could do.

  We gave the most promising ones we auditioned a little extra time. Like David Donato, who we allowed a couple of weeks to settle in. We also recorded a couple of tracks with him. One of the songs was ‘No Way Out’, which, after many changes, turned into ‘The Shining’ off the Eternal Idol album. Different vocals, different lyrics, different arrangement, but still the initial riff. Dave looked right and he was a nice enough lad, but he had a bit of a strange, high voice. Before we knew it, Don Arden already had Kerrang! magazine doing photos, even though we were going: ‘We don’t want to release these yet, he’s not a definite yet!’

  And, sure enough, bang, he was out. After millions of tapes and countless auditions, we still hadn’t found ourselves a singer. But our drummer problem had been sorted, because Bill had come back. Or so we thought. In the summer of 1984 he left again. In and out like a yo-yo he was. Bill is one of those people who is difficult to understand sometimes. Even after all the years I’ve known him, I still never know what it is that makes him tick. And right after Bill, Geezer went as well.

  But I didn’t leave. The only person left standing was me.

  Mug!

  59

  The mysterious case of the lofty lodgers

  After finishing the Born Again tour I rented a house in Bel Air. It was a wonderful place, but I heard these noises all the time, people talking and bumps in the night. I’d look around the house but nobody would be there.

  ‘Blimey, where does that come from?’

  Weird things happened. I came back one night from rehearsal, walked into the kitchen and found a plait of hair on the kitchen table, a couple of feet long. Like a ponytail.

  ‘How did that get there?’

  Another night I came home and found the same sort of thing wrapped around the handle of the front door. I couldn’t explain it.

  I could never figure out the sound of people talking in the house. I called the Bel Air police every time I heard it. At first they’d go around the house: nothing. But they never checked the loft. And after a while they’d come around and go: ‘Oh, it’s him again.’

  I got so concerned about it that I even stayed down at my friend’s house a couple of times. He had a bloody armoury there. He had revolvers and pump-action shotguns and, just like in the movies, a little gun in a book. He said: ‘I’ll come up with you and we’ll have a look. I’ll bring my gun.’

  And so he did. He sat there in the lounge all night. Nothing happened. I thought, he thinks I am loony now. He left and the next day it started again.

  I then hired a security guard. The sauna overlooked the swimming pool, so I put him in there. I said: ‘If you see anything, let me know.’

  After a while he got fed up and said: ‘Hey, man, I can’t stay here all night!’

  I whispered: ‘Shhhh, we’re trying to catch somebody!’

  I was going to extremes to find out who these people were. After the security guy left, I had one of the crew stay with me, but he would be snoring away so loudly that he couldn’t hear anything. Finally, Mark gave me a Magnum. I slept with this huge gun in my hand. One night I heard this horrendous noise. I grabbed Mark’s gun and I dashed to the car with no shirt on and as I drove out I looked back and I saw all these faces in the kitchen window, looking out at me. It freaked me out. I drove straight down to the police, they came up and: nothing. Gone!

  Then I found out that the wires of the burglar alarm had been cut inside the house. I should have moved out really, but then I had Geoff Nicholls to stay with me. I just wanted somebody to see something, if only to prove that I was not crazy. I really thought I was going loopy and so did everybody else.

  One night Geoff and me were in the lounge at two o’clock in the morning and we saw this bloke running across the lawn.

  Fucking hell, finally!

  I got my gun and we opened the door slowly. We slipped out and crawled across the grass. The house was built on a hill and we could hear talking down below. I whispered to Geoff: ‘All right, we’ve got a gun and when they come up . . .’

  We must have been lying there for about an hour waiting for these people to appear, and then the sprinklers came on. It was like a Laurel and Hardy skit, both of us going: ‘Waah!’

  We were soaked and, of course, after that we never found them. But at least Geoff had seen somebody as well. It wasn’t just me any more.

  One night a guy from the crew built this trap in the garden. He made all these zigzags of wire all across the yard and it took him all day to do it. The idea was that if somebody came across he’d get stuck in it and I would be able to see him.

  I heard a noise. I called the police. They came over. And then they got stuck in it.

  I went out with my gun and the police were going: ‘Drop the gun, drop the gun!’

  ‘No, no, I live here!’

  ‘Drop the gun!’

  They could have shot me. I could have shot them as well, come to think of it.

  This thing went on for months. Eventually we found a trapdoor. Upstairs there was a cinema room with a big screen. In the wall there was a cutout, and because it was all papered you couldn’t really see it. We opened this thing, stepped through it, and we could walk all around the house. It was quite a big area; you could virtually stand up there. We found all these piles of cigarette butts and beer cans outside the vents, through which you could look into the rooms. They had obviously been sitting there, seeing everything I did. Fucking hell, they could probably tell a few stories.

  I was relieved that we found that somebody had been there and that the police could finally see that as well. They never found
out who it was. They said afterwards that the easiest thing for me would have been to get a dog. With a dog I’d have found them in no time. Now why the hell didn’t I think of that?

  It made me so paranoid that I eventually moved into a hotel. The first thing I did there was tape all the vents up. I just had a terrible fear of it, so there I was, roasting at the hotel. Even now I’ve got cameras around my house everywhere; I’ve got the gates and the dogs. And it’s all down to that experience.

  60

  Lovely Lita

  Lita Ford opened for us on the Born Again tour. We got together after a show to have a chat, and we hit it off. It developed into a relationship and when I lived in Bel Air, in the house with the people in the loft, she came to visit me there. After I moved out of there and got a penthouse at Crescent Heights and Sunset in LA, she moved in with me. I was still married to Melinda at the time. We had split up, but it took me a long time to get a divorce, so I suppose technically I was committing adultery. Lita and I even got engaged, but we couldn’t do any more than that until I got divorced.

  Lita helped us look for a new singer. She knew a couple of people we could try, but after Bill and Geezer left I was in need of a whole new band. It was her idea to let me use the drummer and the bass player of her band, Eric Singer and Gordon Copley. Eric wanted to play in my band more than he did in Lita’s, so he said to me: ‘If you want a drummer, I would be interested.’

  He ended up working with me for quite a while. Lita then looked at it as, oh, he’s nicked my drummer. She got the hump about it so bad, that our break-up came mainly from that.

  At the time I was doing a lot of drugs again, which was also hard for her. Me and Geoff Nicholls would be at the penthouse a lot, trying to write something and doing coke at the same time. Every time Lita came home, Geoff would be there. It looked like I was more involved with him than I was with her.

  Me and Geoff were in the penthouse one day and I put the chains on the door and something up against it, because you get paranoid when you do a lot of coke. We were working on a song when we heard this loud bang. It was Lita. She couldn’t open the door and pushed it so hard that the whole rim of the door came off, with the chains and everything. And then she got pissed off, because we were at it again.