Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  After a while these things came out as a bootleg. I thought, how did they get it? I asked Glenn and he said: ‘I don’t know.’ There were only so many people who had access to the tapes. It could’ve been somebody at the studio, someone to do with Glenn or Dave Holland, or someone to do with me. We never did find out.

  Some time at the beginning of 2004 my guitar tech, Mike Clement, was at my studio at home transferring boxes of cassettes of riffs on to CDs. He came across a couple of the tracks from the DEP sessions and said: ‘Why don’t you put them out, they’re really good!’

  These tracks coming out on bootlegs was a real pain anyway, so I said to Ralph Baker: ‘We’ve got to do something about this. Maybe we should mix this album and finish it and put it out ourselves. Just to kill the bootleg stuff, really.’

  We remixed the tracks, I added a couple of guitar bits and changed a couple of things. And I had to put a new drummer on because, in the meantime, Dave Holland had been done for molesting young kids. I was terribly shocked when I heard about that. I couldn’t believe it. I was watching the news one morning, and they went: ‘Dave Holland, Judas Priest . . .’

  You could have knocked me over with a feather; I had no idea he was like that at all. I remember Dave playing on one of the DEP sessions one day and he brought this young lad. I never thought anything of it. He said: ‘This is so-and-so, I’m teaching him to play drums, he’s a student of mine.’

  ‘Right, hello.’

  He was probably about eleven or twelve years old or so, maybe a bit older. But when I found out about all that, blimey. He was sentenced to seven or eight years in prison. We thought, we can’t release these with Dave on them! So I took his drum parts off. We brought in Jimmy Copley, a really good player who I knew from Paul Rodgers’s solo stuff, and he did all the drums at my house. Because there were no click tracks on the tapes, he basically had to play to Dave Holland’s tracks. It was a bit awkward, but Jimmy did a real good job.

  They were just demos, we didn’t go into the sounds and stuff, they weren’t intended for release. But when the album, The 1996 DEP Sessions, was released in September 2004 it was received very well. And after all those years, it finally killed the bootlegs.

  74

  Living apart together

  I met my third wife, Valery, when I was in London recording The Eternal Idol. I went out to a club called Tramp one night and I met Val down there. She was a model and a dancer. She danced in one of these variety-type shows, where they would have a dancing team with ten women and a bloke, like a musical. And as a model she did advertisements for face cream and hand cream.

  We swapped numbers. She called me up and we started seeing each other. I didn’t really want to get involved, because at the time I was too interested in doing more drugs, but eventually we did get a relationship going. We were together for six years and then we got married.

  Our wedding was an extremely quick affair. I tried to do it all quietly, but Phil Banfield knew about it and he wanted to be best man. We just got married at this register office with Phil as my witness. We went back home and all my friends were there.

  Blimey, what happened here? It’s supposed to be a secret!

  Phil had organised it and, bloody hell, that surprise party, it was really good!

  We were together for about twelve years. Val helped me out a lot with getting off the drugs, because she hated all that. I really owe a lot to her for doing that. Alcohol was never a major problem, but I was doing a lot of coke and speed. I was going through a part of my life that I didn’t even realise I was in, it was getting worse and worse and I didn’t see it. I got more aggravated and into more arguments and I became somebody else, I suppose.

  When we were married Valery wasn’t going to put up with it any more. We’d have a bust-up every time I did a line. She could tell straight away if I’d done something. I used to sneak into my studio and do a line and then it was: ‘You’ve been doing coke!’

  So eventually I thought, it’s not worth it, arguing every time I do some drugs. It was either stop, or that’s it. And that’s what I did. Well, I stopped doing it regularly, let’s put it that way. I stopped doing it every day.

  Val had a six-bedroom house in north London and I had my house up in the Midlands. She liked to stay in London where her friends were, and I never wanted to move to London, so we’d be in her house for a while and then come back to mine. Or she’d be in London and I’d be home. When I was on tour she wouldn’t stay in the Midlands at all, so that meant I had to have somebody to look after the house there. It was a bit of a funny relationship really.

  Valery had a son, Jay, a really nice kid. It was a bit strange for me, moving from not having my own daughter there and getting married and having somebody else’s kid instead. I couldn’t bring my daughter at first, so it was all very complicated.

  I desperately wanted to bring Toni home. Melinda married again and had two kids with her new husband. Apparently this guy owned some nightclubs in Los Angeles and was deep in the Mafia, but he got caught for something and he was jailed for seven years. Melinda spent a lot of his money while he was in jail and then dumped him. This bloke got out of prison early, at which time the courts allowed him and his sister to have the kids, all three of them. So I went over to Modesto where they lived, to see Toni at their house, because they would have to be there when I visited. It was an awkward situation because he had the other two kids and Toni was looking after them. She was about twelve or thirteen by that time.

  After a while, visiting rights were relaxed. Toni was allowed to stay with me in LA and I took her with me for a week on tour. In the hotels we’d have adjoining rooms, but she’d have to have the door open and the light on, as she was terrified because of all the things that were going on in her life.

  After going through this whole procedure in the courts, I eventually got her out. My big problem was that they thought, oh, he’s in a band. Ah, Black Sabbath! I didn’t have a leg to stand on. They’d ask: ‘When you’re on tour, who is going to look after her?’

  ‘Well, I’ll have a nanny.’

  It came down to a choice between an ex-con who wasn’t the real father and me. The lawyer I hired in Los Angeles said: ‘Look, you are the father and we are going to get her back for you.’

  Eventually we did get her back and in 1996 I could take her home to England. Finally!

  Toni was a nervous wreck when she got here. She was thirteen, she’d been thrown around from pillar to post and she didn’t know what the hell was going on. It took her a long time to settle down and become normal again. For a long time she had bad dreams. She had her own little room with the door open and the light on, and then she’d start screaming in the night and I’d rush in. At first I wondered, how can I help, what am I supposed to do? You give her love, but it was also a matter of me being accepted, because she had missed a great part of her life with me. She didn’t get on with her stepfather, so it was very difficult.

  In the meantime my marriage with Valery was in trouble. She wanted this London life and she wanted to travel the world, whereas I didn’t. I’d been all over the world umpteen times on tour already. We both wanted different things, so were at loggerheads a lot. But the crunch came when Toni came to England. Val didn’t particularly want another child. She already had a son whom we both looked after, so she said: ‘She should go to college. Put her in school and let her stay at school.’

  I said: ‘You can’t do that. She’s been thrown around everywhere; she’s got to live with us.’

  Valery then wanted us to live in London and we went to see a high school down there, but Toni wasn’t happy. She was too young. It was difficult for her to come over from California and suddenly live in London. She didn’t really know Val and then to go to this school where she knew nobody was very hard. So Toni didn’t want to live there and Val said: ‘If she doesn’t want to, that’s it, I’ve done my bit.’

  I got really pissed off about her saying that, because Toni deserved a
good life. In the end I had to hire a nanny to look after her. I thought, Christ, I’m married, she’s living in London and I’m hiring somebody to look after Toni in the Midlands. I had no other option, because I was on tour. Somebody had to do what I was doing and earn the money. It was a real shambles. One of the reasons why me and Val broke up was that she just wouldn’t accept Toni and I couldn’t deal with all that. We gradually pulled away from each other and then the marriage came to an end. We just didn’t communicate well. Instead of talking things over we were always arguing, and I hated that. I said to her: ‘If we ever get into an argument, let’s just say “stop”. And then we’ll stop.’

  We started arguing one day and I said: ‘Stop!’

  She went: ‘What do you mean, fucking “stop”!’

  And she carried on again. So ‘stop’ never worked.

  I just made my mind up: I’m not going to go any further with it. So I said: ‘That’s it, Val.’

  And she went: ‘You can’t divorce me!’

  I said: ‘It’s not working. I don’t want this life any more. Do your own thing.’

  I wanted to break away for her sake as well, so she could do the things she wanted to do and lead the life she wanted to live. She doesn’t see it that way. She thinks I left her for Maria, but that wasn’t the case. Val and me finished long before I met her, but she thinks I had been going with Maria for a while before we broke up.

  She’s done all right out of the divorce. Valery saw this house in Spain and I bought her that, and I bought her another house in London as well. She was happy enough, I think. Well, as far as it goes. Breaking up is always hard. But for me, the pain wouldn’t last long.

  Soon I’d get together with old friends and meet the love of my life.

  75

  The love of my life

  Early in 1997 Sharon Osbourne called and said: ‘Would you be interested in doing a few shows with Ozzy, or maybe a tour? I’m asking you first and if you say yes, then I’ll ask Geezer.’

  It was supposed to be a casual thing as opposed to involving lots of lawyers, so I said yes. Then she asked Geezer and he said yes. I think she was under the impression that Bill would want to go through lawyers and therefore it would be hard work involving him as well, so she didn’t ask him. I asked her about Bill, but she said: ‘No, we are going to use Mike Bordin, Ozzy’s drummer.’

  Geezer and me were only going to do a few songs and it didn’t seem like it was a big thing, so we agreed on doing it with Mike. The plan was for Ozzy to do his own set first, and then we’d walk on and close the show, not unlike we’d done in Costa Mesa back in 1992. It was just a ‘join you on stage’ sort of thing. We agreed on a fee and did it. In May 1997 we started a five-week tour of America, for about twenty-five Ozzfest shows.

  I liked it. It was good and things were going well between me, Ozzy and Geezer. I think it was a bit of a trial thing anyway, to see how we all got on again. Initially we didn’t see a lot of each other. Ozzy would fly in later and arrive at the gigs separate from us and Geezer and me each travelled in a bus of our own. We also stayed at the best hotels, always the Four Seasons or the Ritz-Carltons. It was okay, it was organised well.

  On 17 June, Ozzy’s voice gave out and he cancelled the show. Geezer and I heard Ozzy was not going to fly in, but we were in the dressing room already and the bands were playing. We had Marilyn Manson on with us, Pantera, Type O Negative, Fear Factory and a couple of others. Somebody said: ‘Would you be able to play with some of the other guys, with Marilyn Manson singing?’

  I said: ‘No, we don’t want to do that.’

  ‘Well, we’ve got to do something.’

  ‘Not with us. If you want to do that, let them do it and jam or whatever.’

  It wasn’t that we had anything against the other bands, but we were there to do it with Ozzy and that was that. We certainly wouldn’t go up and jam, because that was the kiss of death: you could see before it happened what was going to happen. And, sure enough, it did: before they all went on to jam somebody announced that Ozzy had lost his voice, and there was uproar. They just went crazy. As they do.

  These other guys went on anyway and played, which was good of them. They prevented it from getting completely out of hand. Still, the crowd turned police cars over, rioting, it got pretty bad. We left fairly sharpish afterwards and got out all right. We went back there two weeks later to do the rescheduled gig and that went fine.

  One day I bumped into this girl, Martina Axén, who was the drummer in the Swedish band Drain STH, who were on the tour as well. She said: ‘You’ve got to come and see the band.’

  I went to watch them a couple of times. They were really good, so when Martina asked if I could help them with a song, I said: ‘Yeah, come over to the house after we’re done.’

  Their singer, Maria Sjöholm, always kept to herself, so I never met her. After the tour she and Martina flew over from Sweden, just for a day. They came over to the house, where it was just me and my daughter, Toni. Valery wasn’t there, because at that point we weren’t an item any more, so they said: ‘Can we cook for you?’

  ‘Yeah!’

  After getting groceries at the local market, we went into the studio and I played them some things. I asked them what they wanted and came up with an idea for them. That took all of twenty minutes and then they went into the house to start cooking. They had brought all this red wine over and two huge bars of Swedish chocolate. I already had this big bar of Cadbury’s chocolate. They started eating that, and we had a few drinks. It was off to dinner and we had some more drinks and they also ate all the chocolate they’d brought for me as well. The pair of them just polished off these two big bars! I’ll never forget that about them – it was really funny.

  I had to fly off somewhere the next day to start another tour, so they drove up to London with me. I picked Ozzy up on the way and then the four of us went to the airport where they took a flight back to Stockholm.

  Throughout the year I talked to Maria on the phone about how the song was going. It became a regular thing. I’d call her and we’d just be chatting away, sometimes for hours and hours. We got more and more friendly and, right before the 1999 Black Sabbath Reunion tour started, I just said: ‘Why don’t you come over for a few days? I’ll send you a ticket. Come to the show in Phoenix.’

  She thought about it and said: ‘Okay.’

  She flew in and she was really nervous. I didn’t quite know what to do either.

  Oh dear, she’s turned up!

  We played Phoenix on New Year’s Eve and then she came with us to Las Vegas. We really enjoyed each other’s company. And that was it: we started seeing each other a lot and eventually she moved to England. That was in 1999.

  The track we wrote for Drain STH was called ‘Black’ and it appeared on their album Freaks of Nature. It was released in 1999, but the band broke up not long after that. As an all-girl band, it was tough for them out there. They had toured for years and Maria had had enough of the travelling. She told the other girls and gave them a tour’s notice to find somebody else. They didn’t, so they parted company. I probably got the blame for that.

  We didn’t get married until 2002. I’d been married before on 2, 3 and 6 November, so that wasn’t an auspicious month for me. I said to Maria: ‘No way we’re getting married in November. Don’t even mention November!’

  We were on tour in August, a safe distance from November, and when we had a break in Los Angeles my office organised this woman to come over to the hotel and marry us right there. We got married on 19 August at the Sunset Marquis. I didn’t tell anybody, not even the band. Nobody was there, so I got Eddie, who worked for me, to come up to be the witness. We wanted to do it without all the fuss, so we did it all quietly.

  Best thing I ever did!

  76

  Reunion

  We didn’t want to play with Mike Bordin. We all wanted to have Bill back for the next tour. Ozzy, Geezer and me had done the initial test of how we were getting o
n. We were asking ourselves: is it going to work? What is the interest like? Well, we did get along and the shows went great and everybody loved it. So it seemed obvious that we should get the old, full line-up back for a next tour.

  We had to make the terms so that we didn’t get into big arguments, not from our side but management-wise. We each had our own management and that could be hard work, so we decided that it should be left to one person without everybody else chipping in as well, otherwise it would be chaos. And that’s what happened. Because Sharon had organised the Ozzfest, she was also going to manage the reunion.

  We rehearsed with Bill and worked out the show, and then we did a few gigs before going to the NEC to record the Reunion live album on 5 December 1997. We did the NEC too early in the tour, really. I thought we needed to play a lot more first. We had rehearsed, but we had only done two gigs and then suddenly there we were, doing two days at the NEC and recording it. We hadn’t got into routines and whether to do a little solo here or build a big climax there; we were just playing the songs. It would’ve been nice to have loosened up more.

  It was nerve-wracking, because we knew we were recording it. When you do a regular show, after the last song it’s over and done with, but when it’s recorded everybody can see and hear it afterwards forever and ever. Also it was a hometown gig, which made us even more nervous. Friends were coming. Brian May was there and Cozy and Neil as well. As a matter of fact, the four of us went out for dinner to a Chinese restaurant afterwards.