by Tony Iommi
It was like forty years ago, only with grown men.
We did a few gigs and we had requests for a lot more. Jasper had a weekly TV show and we even played on that, doing ‘Route 66’ and a song by Status Quo. And we had Belch T-shirts as well, really naff ones. But Jasper got too busy doing his comedy shows. He owned a big part of the television production company Celador, and he went on to do Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?. The other band members got too busy as well. We didn’t break up as such; we just didn’t have the time to do it any more. But who knows? Maybe we’ll do it again someday.
Just for a laugh.
80
Iommi, the album
When I told Sharon Osbourne about my idea of making an album with all different singers, she was really interested in releasing it on the Osbournes’ label, Divine Records. We had some offers from other companies, but I thought, well, she’s good at what she does. She offered us a good amount of money, but, more than that, she was going to get it going, give it a kick up the arse, do the promotion. So we came to an agreement. We seemed to get on well then, but I couldn’t resist referring to the many disagreements we’d had in the past when I thanked her in the CD booklet, writing: ‘Who’d have thought it!’
I wrote some of the stuff at my house but most of it was done at producer Bob Marlette’s place in California. I didn’t quite know what direction to go in after the Sabbath stuff. Follow that or just go off a bit? What we ended up doing was still riffy, but more modern. Bob directed it that way, and he did a good job at that. He’s a keyboard player as well, and he had a good ear for what was needed. I wrote the riffs and he put a drum pattern and effects to them. He used a lot of effects, computerised stuff, because he was good at that.
We did what I’d wanted to do when I did Seventh Star. This time, there was huge enthusiasm. We had every singer we wanted and more. We actually had to turn people down. It was also a good experience for me to work with so many different artists. It was a challenge. Take, for instance, how we worked with Billy Corgan on the song ‘Black Oblivion’. We went into the A&M Studios and Billy was going to play bass and sing. He came down to the studio a few days before and I played him some riffs. I recorded them on a little cassette for him to take away and listen to. He came back a couple of days later and brought drummer Kenny Aronoff down to the studio with him. Billy said it would be nice to do a track with loads of different changes in it. We ended up writing and recording it at the same time. It was that quick. There’s actually a lot of stuff on the album that we played live. We were jamming and it really pushed your brain.
It helped to have Kenny Aronoff there as well, because he’s really good. I’m sure he’s one of the few who’d be able to play something with so many changes in it, there and then, as we were doing it.
‘Oh, let’s put another bit in here!’
Going through the whole song again and playing it live, it was nerve-wracking. I was working with people I’d never worked with before, writing songs I had to get my head around while normally I’d live with them a bit first, and all that in one day, writing it and recording it. ‘Black Oblivion’ with Billy was a tough song in particular, with all those different changes in it, but it turned out great and it was a good experience doing it this way.
‘Laughing Man’, with Henry Rollins, was one of the first we put down. Henry came over to Bob’s studio, which was basically a small room at his house. Henry was singing away into a microphone while I was sitting on the couch only a few feet away. It’s a very heavy track. We had played a couple of things to Henry and he picked that one and wrote all the lyrics to that. He really enjoyed doing it.
Another guy who was really up for it was Dave Grohl. When I had him come down to the studio to do ‘Goodbye Lament’, I already had Matt Cameron on drums and Dave said: ‘Oh, I’d love to play this track? Can I play drums as well as sing?’
So he played drums and he was really good. With most singers, like Serj Tankian from System Of A Down, Skin of Skunk Anansie, Phil Anselmo of Pantera, Ian Astbury from The Cult and Billy Idol, we’d send them a cassette with a track we’d written beforehand. They’d put lyrics to them, come down to studios, be there for the day and sing it.
Peter Steele’s ‘Just Say No To Love’ was very different, because he has such a unique voice. I knew him because we’d had Type O Negative on our tours so often. When he came to the studio he kept saying: ‘I’m so honoured to do this, that you asked me. And I’m really nervous.’
I said: ‘Don’t worry. Relax.’
Before he sang he said: ‘Have you got any wine?’
I got him a bottle of wine and to settle his nerves he gulped the whole thing down just like that. I felt sorry for him, really. He died in April 2010, which came as a huge shock to me. Peter was a big, tall and very, very nice guy.
Ozzy wrote the lyrics to ‘Who’s Fooling Who’. For Ozzy to sit down and write lyrics was unusual, but he came back with them and did it. It was much the same as when we did ‘Psycho Man’, one of the new tracks for the Reunion album. He came down and sat there and told a few jokes. It’s an all-day thing with him. He then put a bit down and Bob worked with him on that: get a verse first and then build that up. He had done two verses and then I had done an up-tempo thing which I wanted him to sing on as well, but he didn’t so I just played a solo in it.
The album was released in October 2000 and it was simply called Iommi. Sharon held a big launch party for it. She put a lot of work into it and I thought she did a good job. The album got great reviews all over the place and especially in America it received a lot of airplay. Sales were good as well, although I wasn’t really bothered about that. It was much more important to me that I’d done something that I had wanted to do for a long time. It was nice working with different artists, younger and older.
81
An audience with the Queen
The year 2001 passed without much incident. Again Black Sabbath joined the Ozzfest, starting off with a couple of gigs in the UK, after which the summer was spent on the road in America. The following year after we skipped the Ozzfest, as we didn’t want to headline it every single year. The same bands on the bill every time would be deadly for the fest and we didn’t want to get into a situation where people would think, oh . . . them again!
Sharon Osbourne did have a big surprise in store for me that year. In May 2002 she got in touch about me and Ozzy doing a gig at Buckingham Palace for the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, celebrating the fact that Queen Elizabeth II had been on the throne for fifty years. I thought, that’s a strange request to get us on that show. They were used to having Cliff Richard and The Beach Boys, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey, Paul McCartney even. But I certainly wouldn’t have expected me and Ozzy. That was a real curveball.
They said: ‘Would you mind having Phil Collins play drums?’
‘Of course, great, fantastic!’
And we had Pino Palladino from The Who playing bass, a lovely guy. At our rehearsal we started playing ‘Paranoid’ and Ozzy turned around and gave Phil Collins a really weird look. I know what Ozzy’s like, he just does that anyway. But Phil didn’t. After a while Ozzy left and I ran through the song with Phil and Pino again. Phil said to me: ‘What’s the matter with Ozzy, haven’t I been playing it right?’
‘Yes, you’ve been playing it fine.’
‘But he gave me such a dirty look!’
‘He probably didn’t even notice he did that. No, there’s nothing wrong.’
‘Oh, I was concerned. Tell me if I’m not playing it right.’
‘You’re playing it great!’
The next day we went to Buckingham Palace to do the sound check. It was like Fort Knox to get in it, which is understandable I suppose. We went on stage, outside in the grounds of the Palace. We did our sound check but had to come off stage in the middle of it, because there was a fire in one of the rooms in the Palace. Apparently they had boxes and boxes of fireworks they were going to let off on the night and were concerned we�
��d all blow up, so they had to go and investigate.
Brian May had called me the day before. He was to go up on the roof to play ‘God Save The Queen’, and he said: ‘Would you do it with us?’
I said: ‘Oh God, I can’t do that. I would never be able to learn that and be comfortable enough to play it in front of billions of people watching on TV!’
‘Well, just come up with us then.’
‘I don’t like heights. I can’t!’
‘You play on stage then and I’ll play up there!’
‘I’d never learn it in time!’
Thank goodness I said no to that. But Brian was brave enough to do it.
Backstage before the gig I stood outside talking to Paul McCartney and some other people. It was great, but there were all these signs saying ‘No Drinking’, ‘No Swearing’, no this, no that. That terrified Ozzy more than anything, because with him everything is fucking this and fucking that, so he was practising not swearing. He walked up and down in the dressing room going: ‘Raise your hands, come on, raise your hands . . .’ instead of his normal: ‘Raise your fucking hand, you fuckers!’
I thought, no way he’s going to keep that up! But he did.
We went on, and Ozzy went on too soon. He was excited and was already walking on as they announced us. We did the gig and it went really good. We came off and I had a chat with a few others, Tom Jones and the rest of them.
A great day.
Afterwards we were invited to the Palace for a drink. I was standing there in this fantastic, huge, lovely room talking to Phil Collins when Tony Blair spotted me and came over: ‘Tony! Tony!’
‘Eh?’
I’d never met him in my life. It was unreal to have the prime minister come over to me like he’d known me for years. He said: ‘I’m a big fan. I’ve got all the early albums!’
Then his wife came over and he introduced me to her. While I was talking to them, I saw Ozzy walking over to me. He asked me something and I went: ‘Oz, meet Tony Blair.’
He went: ‘Oh, eh . . . hello.’
And that was it. Tony Blair put his hand out and it was like . . . nothing. Ozzy didn’t even acknowledge him and just walked off. I said to Tony: ‘He’s always like that, you know.’
Because I didn’t know what to say.
Tony said: ‘It’s okay.’
Then I saw Prince Charles walk over to talk to Ozzy. I thought, oh hell, there’s no way Ozzy is going to be able to talk to him without swearing. The whole thing, it was just unreal.
I ended up meeting the Queen, Prince Charles, Princess Anne and all the gang, and they were really nice. When you see them on TV it’s all very serious, but they were down to earth. I was quite surprised. The Queen didn’t really say anything and I didn’t say anything to her. She just comes by and smiles and you nod and that’s it really. She talked to hardly anybody. But the two young princes, William and Harry, came over and said to me: ‘Why didn’t you play “Black Sabbath”?’
I said: ‘I don’t think that would have gone down that well.’
It was a great night. The original idea was to stay there for only fifteen minutes and clear off, but I’d been there half an hour, forty minutes, and I was the first to leave. Maria and me went back to the hotel, the Lanesborough, overlooking the back of Buckingham Palace, a real flash place. We went up to our room, got into bed and about two and a half hours later the fire alarm went off: ‘Would you please leave the rooms, please leave the rooms.’
We got dressed and, as we walked out into the hallway, I saw the Fire Brigade going into Ozzy’s room.
Somebody had set the alarm off and they assumed it was coming from his room. But it wasn’t him; he was in bed with Sharon. The Fire Brigade burst in and Ozzy had a fit.
We had to evacuate and stand around outside. I couldn’t believe it: twice in one day, in the afternoon at Buckingham Palace and then at our hotel. So everybody thought, that’s strange, it happened over there and now here as well . . . it must be them!
82
Hats off to Rob Halford
On 9 December 2003, people from several British television shows got in touch with me to see if I would do an interview about Ozzy’s accident. I didn’t know what the hell they were on about, but I soon learned that he had crashed his quad bike and broken his collarbone and lots of other things. He was in hospital for quite a while where he had metal bars put in his shoulder and his collarbone. He was very lucky to be alive.
I spoke to him, of course – I wouldn’t just leave him like that – and Sharon let us know how he was doing as well. Apart from him nearly dying, he was doing very well actually. Ozzy had just released the old Black Sabbath song ‘Changes’ as a duet with his daughter Kelly. I never knew he was going to be doing that and I was quite surprised, but it was great. And after his crash it went straight to No. 1.
It took Ozzy quite a while to heal, but in June he was well enough to do the Ozzfest again, with Black Sabbath headlining once more. We kicked off in Hartford, Connecticut. While we were playing ‘War Pigs’, they projected a film behind us showing George Bush sporting a clown’s nose, together with Adolf Hitler. One of the problems with these Ozzfests was that all this stuff was done without us knowing about it. Either that, or they would show it to us at such a late stage that it would be a case of use it or scrap it altogether. The Hitler thing caused a bit of an uproar, but, then again, there’s been uproar about everything we’ve bloody done.
Judas Priest was on the bill as well. Towards the end of the tour, Rob Halford had to step in for Ozzy. In the afternoon of the Camden, New Jersey, show, the tour manager and the production manager said to me: ‘We’ve got a problem.’
I thought, oh, here we go.
They said: ‘Ozzy is not going to make the gig tonight.’
‘Ah . . .’
‘How would you feel about somebody else doing the gig, like Rob Halford?’
‘Has anybody asked Rob? If he’d be interested in doing it?’
‘No, we thought we’d ask you first.’
I said: ‘As long as you let the kids know that Ozzy is not doing the gig before they’re coming in, or let them know well in advance that Rob is going to do it, fine. We will do it if Rob can do it.’
Rob quickly learned our stuff in his bus. He’d seen our show umpteen times so he just had to watch the DVD a bit and run over the things that he didn’t know so much.
We were due to go on stage and I said to the tour manager: ‘You did tell the kids, right?’
‘No, we haven’t said anything.’
‘You’re kidding. You have to let the kids know that Ozzy is not going to be doing it!’
They asked me if I would go on and announce it and I said: ‘You left it this late, I’m certainly not going to walk out and say Ozzy’s not showing up!’
Eventually Bill told the crowd Ozzy couldn’t do it, but that Rob was kind enough to stand in, and so on. Black Sabbath followed Judas Priest, so Rob came off the stage, changed his clothes, and he had like a half an hour before he had to go on again. It went great. It was tremendous how he did his set and then ours as well. My hat off to him, he’s such a great performer.
The tour went on until 4 September, when we were going to do a show in West Palm Beach. You could say we went down a storm without even playing, because it was cancelled due to Hurricane Frances. We were staying at this hotel there and I had some friends who flew out from England to watch the show. As soon as they arrived it was cancelled.
The band had a private jet so we got out before the storm came in big time, and I let my friends stay in my hotel room. They survived it. They must have been all right, because when I received the bill later I saw they drank my minibar dry.
83
Fused with Glenn again
Late in 2004 I started working on my next solo album. First we tried a singer called Jørn Lande from the German band Masterplan. He was a nice lad with a great voice who sounded very much like Ronnie James Dio. But then it turned out Gl
enn Hughes was free to work on a record with me again. Glenn is really talented, he is good to work with and we get on really well, so it seemed good for us to have another go at making an album.
We went into a rehearsal room in Birmingham to work on the songs of what was to become Fused. The first day we got together we met Mike Exeter there, who is the engineer in my own studio at home. Mike said: ‘Do you want a cup of coffee, Glenn?’
‘Yes, please.’
It was fatal to give Glenn a cup of coffee, because as soon as he had it, he went into overdrive. Bang! It was just like he’d had three lines of coke again. He drove us up the wall getting all excited like that.
‘Well, Tone, is it all right, Tone, let’s go, Tone!’
He couldn’t sit still for five seconds.
I said: ‘Glenn!’
He was fidgeting and talking away: ‘Yeah, well, I’m sorry, I don’t drink coffee! And I . . . I . . . I shouldn’t drink it really!’
He wouldn’t shut up. Mike came in and I said: ‘No more coffee for him!’
Just like I’d done for the DEP sessions, I played Glenn some riffs. He is the sort of bloke who will sing on anything you play him.
‘Oh, I like that one. And I like that one. And that one!’
‘Which one do you want to do then?’
We’d pick one and build it into a song.
We had a bash for a couple of days and then we brought Bob Marlette in to work on some more songs and produce the record. I said to Bob: ‘Let’s put a few tracks down, let’s have a little bash’, and we came up with four or five tracks in no time at all. We recorded them at my house and most of those tapes were actually used for the final tracks.
Since working with Kenny Aronoff on the Iommi album I just thought he was a really good drummer, so we brought him over. The four of us worked on the songs, we did rough takes of all the tracks and we took it to the Monnow Valley Studios in Monmouth to record it properly there. It was all very quick: got together, wrote it and recorded it.