Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  Those were the terms under which we did it, and so we did it.

  The first of the two Costa Mesa nights, Rob was nervous. He walked on stage way too early and he started the song too early as well. It’s bloody tough to learn somebody else’s songs that quick, and then to go on and actually do them with the band, but Rob did great. He really is a great professional.

  The second and last night we did the thing with Ozzy. We came off stage after our set with Rob, and then later we came on again, me and Geezer and Bill Ward, who’d joined us for the occasion as well, and we did ‘Black Sabbath’, ‘Fairies Wear Boots’, ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Paranoid’ with Ozzy. Doing those few songs together brought back a nice vibe and the crowd was great. They were in awe; they couldn’t believe we were on stage together after all these years. It was a great gig.

  Of course after that there were rumours all over the place about the old line-up getting together again. Everybody assumed, oh, they’ll probably do it. Well, it may have come up, but we didn’t do anything at all about it at that time. It was a great thing to do, but after the show we were left with nothing. We had a big finale and that was it. We didn’t have a band any more.

  I sat in Florida for six weeks, waiting for my passport, dying to go home.

  71

  In harmony with Cross Purposes

  I returned home and my first thought was to get a band together again. We auditioned some British drummers, but none of them worked out. At a certain point Bobby Rondinelli, who had played with Rainbow, called me. He wanted to do it. I suppose it’s the old thing: if you don’t call, you don’t get anywhere. Fair dues to him, he got in touch and it got him the job. He flew over and as soon as he started playing, that was it. He was a similar drummer to Vinny, very precise. He fitted in personality-wise as well.

  We didn’t look around for other singers, we simply asked Tony Martin back again. He got screwed around so many times by us really, but he was good enough to hang in there. As soon as Bobby came in we started writing the songs for our next album, Cross Purposes. So it was me, Tony, Geezer, Bobby and Geoff, and it went really well. We finished writing the new songs in the summer of 1993.

  Leif Mases helping us out with ‘Time Machine’ for the Wayne’s World soundtrack had been a good experience, so this time we asked him to produce the whole of Cross Purposes. He was good to work with and the recording went smoothly. Songs like ‘Virtual Death’, a heavy, powerful riff, and ‘The Hand That Rocks The Cradle’ were joint efforts between me and Geezer, who came up with more and more ideas. And ‘Cardinal Sin’ was a song about a Catholic priest from Ireland, who hid his love child for twenty-one years. That would be a very topical song now, with all the stuff that’s been going on quite recently.

  ‘Evil Eye’ was a track we were working on when Van Halen were playing the NEC in Birmingham. Eddie got in touch with me and I said: ‘We’re rehearsing. We’re writing a new album.’

  He wanted to get together, so I picked him up from the hotel in Birmingham and we drove down to Henley-in-Arden where we rehearsed. We got him a guitar from the music shop, one of his models, had a jam and he played on ‘Evil Eye’. I played the riff and he played a great solo over it. Unfortunately we didn’t record it properly on our little tape player so I never got a chance to hear it!

  That was a funny day. Eddie said: ‘Don’t you want any beers? Can I pick some beers up?’

  I couldn’t drink because I had to drive him back to the hotel, but we picked up a case of beer, got to the rehearsal place and he was legless by the time we left. But it was great to see him, and it was great he came over to have a play. Having a jam with Eddie and letting go a bit, it gave everybody a boost.

  The album was released in the beginning of 1994. In the sleeve notes I gave a big thanks to ‘all at the Modesto County Jail for the kind hospitality and making me realize that there’s no place like home’.

  Even though Cross Purposes wasn’t a huge seller, it did all right. For once I.R.S. were getting behind it; they were even doing advertisements for it on MTV. It was with renewed confidence that we embarked on another world tour.

  Motörhead supported us in America. Their singer, Lemmy, is a real character.

  Of course, there’s no food on their rider at all, only booze. You walk past their dressing room and there’s nothing to eat, but there is all this wine and Jack Daniel’s and beer. They are the epitome of rock ’n’ roll. It just goes on and on and on with them. I’ll never forget seeing their guitar player, Phil Campbell, at the side of the stage once. He threw up, and the next minute he was on stage, playing away. Cor blimey, how do they do that? How do they cope with that? Their bodies must be indestructible.

  Lemmy is probably going to die on stage. I certainly don’t see him settling down in some old people’s home. He used to go on their tour bus and he’d get off in the same clothes the next day, on stage as well, come off . . . Motörhead, they just live like gypsies really.

  One funny story I heard about Lemmy: he was playing away and he said to his monitor guy: ‘Can you hear this horrible sound coming out of my monitors?’

  The bloke said: ‘No.’

  And Lemmy went: ‘Neither can I. Turn me up!’

  The last tour we did with Dio, we had them on one of the shows with us. Lemmy came up to me and said: ‘How are you enjoying the tour?’

  I said: ‘Oh, I really like it. It’s great that we’ve all known each other so long and we’re all around the same age.’

  And he said: ‘Yeah, and we all know the same dead people as well.’

  I was thinking, he’s hit it on the head. Blimey, he’s right!

  Tony Martin had a fabulous voice, but we were always on to him about his performance. He was very amateurish as far as that was concerned. Overnight he went from working only local little venues in Birmingham to big stages everywhere. It was a difficult position to be in, to have to front a band that everybody knows from great performers like Ozzy and Ronnie. It was a bit much for him and, just like Ray Gillen when he joined us, Tony got carried away with it. His head got a bit bigger. We were playing in Europe somewhere and Tony had this portable video player. He was at the bar of the hotel showing these people a video of himself performing with us: ‘Look, that’s me up there!’

  Very unprofessional: you just don’t do stuff like that. Albert Chapman, who was managing him at the time, was livid. He said: ‘Put that fucking thing away!’

  And then he suddenly started going under the name of Tony ‘Cat’ Martin. Where did this ‘Cat’ come from all of a sudden? He did these things that were just off the wall.

  One time in America during the Cross Purposes tour, his lack of stage presence or star quality, or whatever you want to call it, became painfully clear. Right in the middle of the show Tony decided to run along the audience between the stage and the barriers holding the people back in the front. He jumped off the stage to start his run and this security guy grabbed him and tossed him out because he thought he was a fan.

  ‘But I’m the singer!’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  Things like that would never happen to Ozzy or Ronnie. But you couldn’t complain about Tony’s voice. That was just great. He’d get on and do the job, and he never missed a show. Tony was a nice guy as well and he stuck with it for ten years.

  In April and May we did the UK and Europe with Cathedral and Godspeed. Those two bands travelled together, but they were always fighting. It got worse as the tour went on. You’d see them first with sticking plaster here and there, and next you’d see the bandages come out and one had his arm in a sling. Really peculiar.

  In April our gig at the Hammersmith Odeon was recorded and filmed for a video and CD package called Cross Purposes Live, which was released about a year later. I once heard somebody describe it as the most underpromoted release of all time. That’s probably very true, because even I can only vaguely remember it being released.

  The final European show turned out to be Bobby Rondinelli’s
last gig, because we finished the tour again with a couple of shows in South America and I was talking to Bill and I said: ‘We’re doing South America next.’

  He went: ‘I’d love to play South America!’

  ‘Oh? You want to do it with us then?’

  ‘Oh, yeah!’

  Blimey.

  He said: ‘What do you want me to do? Meet you there?’

  He didn’t know any of the songs with Tony Martin, so I said: ‘No. You’ve got to come to England and rehearse.’

  ‘Oh, all right then.’

  He came over, we rehearsed and he was great on the old Sabbath stuff, but he struggled a bit on newer songs like ‘Headless Cross’.

  It was Geezer, me and Bill, so we had almost the old line-up, plus Tony Martin. Off we went to South America, with Kiss and Slayer on the bill, as well as a few others. We got on stage in front of something like 100,000 people and the pressure was on; we got by but in the end dropped the newer material. In order to keep going we ended up only doing songs like ‘Iron Man’ and ‘War Pigs’, the stuff Bill knew. But fair dues to Tony, he sang those old songs great.

  After the tour ended, Geezer went back to Ozzy. Things needed to change. I said: ‘That’s it! I’m getting Neil and Cozy back!’ Within five minutes we were back together again. There might have been some hard feelings because of how things had worked out in the past, but we resolved that. We got back together and started work on the Forbidden album.

  72

  The one that should’ve been Forbidden

  The record company suggested we should use a more hip producer. They were going on about the guy who produced Ice T, the guitar player in his band, Body Count, Ernie Cunnigan, better known as Ernie C. They said it would give us a bit more street cred, because they thought we’d lost that. You know what it’s like: you get these whiz-kids at the company who come up with these great brainwaves that don’t work. And that was one of them, but I half-heartedly went along with it. Cozy wasn’t mad on the idea either and now I can see why. The production was dreadful. Here I was working with someone from a hip hop background. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, but I just wasn’t familiar with it and it opened up a whole new can of worms for me.

  The first thing Ernie C did was to get Cozy to play this ta-ta-ta-ta bass drum stuff. It’s a different style of playing altogether that these hip hop guys do as opposed to what we do, and it caused all sorts of ruckuses. Cozy was a respected drummer in his own field, and here was somebody coming along, going: ‘Play this.’

  It really offended him. And the more Cozy tried, the more he got pissed off because he didn’t want to play it. It made it very difficult for everybody, because we all felt that bad vibe. To make things worse, all this was coming from a producer who didn’t know anything about us. Ernie claimed he did, but it was a total shambles. The sound wasn’t very good on anything and I wasn’t happy at all with that album. None of us was.

  I thought, well, maybe it’s me that’s wrong. Maybe they can do a better job than us. So we gave them the benefit of the doubt and just kept out of it. Also, if we’d have started throwing our oar in, saying, ‘We want that to sound like this’, we would’ve been back to where we started again. What would have been the point of having somebody come in then?

  Since the days of Rodger Bain I’ve always been involved in the production and the mixing somewhere along the line, but not at all with this album. If it had gone down a storm I would really have been worried: blimey, it must have been me all along!

  It was a bad experience from start to finish. Forbidden was released in June 1995. I thought it was crap, even down to the cartoon cover art, so it didn’t surprise me that it didn’t sell. However, we did tour with it. We started the Forbidden tour off with two big festival gigs in Sweden and Denmark and then went to the States, again with Motörhead supporting us. Cozy and me got up to a lot of silly pranks; he was as bad as me. Setting people’s beds up and taking the legs off things and removing the TV from the hotel room and throwing it out of the window – it was back to the old days again. I got one of those blow-up dolls and I put clothes on it and I hung it from the balcony of our hotel in Los Angeles. People were looking up and we were screaming and shouting, pretending there was an argument going on. More and more people were looking up and then I threw the doll off the balcony. Mad it was.

  I’ve always been one for playing jokes on people in every line-up of Black Sabbath, but, of course, they got back at me as well. In the early days I was once taking a shower when there was a knock on the hotel room door. I opened it and it was Ozzy with a full bucket of water. As I put my head out, he threw the water over me, dropped the bucket and ran. I started after him, but I had no clothes on and the door shut behind me. I thought, ah, for Christ’s sake!

  I knocked on the other guys’ doors because I wanted to phone down to reception to get help, but of course they wouldn’t let me in. I stood there in the hallway naked and, ding!, the lift door opened and all these people came out. They were all dressed up from their night out and there was me with no clothes on at all. We all stood there, staring at each other, not knowing what to do. They must have thought I was a right pervert. Eventually security came up, because someone had phoned down saying: ‘There’s a naked man running around in the hallway!’

  I had to explain what had happened and they let me in my room again. The guys got me good that time.

  My most embarrassing moment was when we came back from America after a big tour. We got to Heathrow and one of the guys said to me: ‘I can’t get all my suitcases on the trolley. You couldn’t put one on your trolley, could you?’

  I said: ‘Sure.’

  And so I did. We went through ‘nothing to declare’, and of course they stopped me.

  ‘Excuse me, sir, are these your suitcases?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Can we look in them?’

  ‘Go ahead.’

  They opened my suitcases and they were fine. Then they got to this other case and opened that up. I could’ve dropped dead on the spot, because this suitcase was full of sex toys. There were blow-up dolls, dildos, handcuffs, all the paraphernalia. I couldn’t believe it and didn’t know what to say. There was a queue behind me, other people waiting to have their suitcases searched. They were pulling all this stuff out and I heard all this giggling going on behind me. I was so embarrassed, especially because they knew who I was. And, of course, I couldn’t suddenly go: ‘It’s not my suitcase.’

  They really set me up and I have to say it was a great one. Of course, after I’d gone through customs there they all were, in stitches. They thought it was hilarious. That’s what happens when you play jokes on people. They get you back!

  We finished in the first week of August with three dates in California, carefully avoiding the city of Modesto. They were Cozy’s last gigs with us. I had seen it coming as the tour progressed. He wasn’t happy at all, because the situation had changed. He wasn’t involved as much in the writing as before; it was down to me again. He wasn’t the co-captain of the ship any more either and he didn’t feel at all comfortable with that. And bloody Ernie C telling him what to play obviously turned the tables on him. So he decided to quit the band and left.

  Bobby Rondinelli came back and off we went again, on a tour that was scheduled to go on until well into December. But my arm was going numb. It started to get really bad in America, so I went to a doctor there who also happened to be a surgeon. He said: ‘Your problem is in your neck and it’s really dangerous. You need it operated on as soon as you can. And it just so happens I can do the operation tomorrow.’

  I went: ‘Hang on. No!’

  I thought, Christ, I’ve got to get home to England and get it properly seen to. I flew home and went to see two specialists. They said: ‘No, the problem is in there, in your wrist.’

  Thank God I didn’t go with this bloke in America, or I would’ve had an operation on my neck. I had a carpal tunnel operation instead. They cut into m
y inside arm, just above the wrist, and it’s almost like a plastic band that goes around there. I was awake while they operated on me and I could actually hear it go ‘crack!’. It made me feel sick because I could hear the noise and it felt all cold as the blood came out. Here I was, getting nauseous, and the two surgeons were merrily talking away: ‘Oh, did you see that thing on TV the other day . . .’

  They were trying to involve me in the conversation as well, going: ‘Oh, look how lovely this is cut away’, but there was no way I could look at it. Bloody hell, I was doing my utmost not to vomit while I was being operated on.

  Then they stitched it up and that was it. After a while I could play again. It cured it and I was never bothered by that again. Nowadays it’s everything else that’s playing up!

  Carpal tunnel did cut the Forbidden tour short, as we had to cancel a couple of weeks’ worth of dates. Just as well, really. I financed the tour and paying for the bus, the crew, the hotels, the musicians, this and that, and it was actually costing me money to go out and play. We just couldn’t keep on doing that.

  I was sitting back home with my arm all bandaged up. When the tour stopped the band broke up and it would be many years before I’d see Tony Martin again. And I had no idea that Forbidden was Black Sabbath’s last studio album ever. Or at least for a very, very long time.

  73

  Flying solo with Glenn Hughes

  After the Forbidden album the deal with I.R.S. Records expired and to all intents and purposes Black Sabbath was on hold. I talked to Phil Banfield and Ralph Baker about working with a singer when I heard Glenn Hughes was coming to England. He came over to see me, and we started writing songs really quickly. He was singing and playing bass. It was only a bit of fun really; what we did wasn’t intended to be released. It was just something to see what we could do. Also I needed to work because at that point I wasn’t doing a fat lot. I needed to keep myself going.

  Glenn suggested getting Dave Holland, who, years ago, was the drummer with Judas Priest. Dave came over and played a bit on this electric kit. We put some ideas down and we went into UB40’s studio, called DEP, so that we could demo the stuff properly, with Dave playing a real kit. We recorded all the songs and then left them because I went to do the first Black Sabbath reunion tour with Ozzy, after which I started to work on my solo album, which went in a different direction altogether. That’s why these DEP sessions just got lost, forgotten about.