Iron Man

by Tony Iommi

  Fused was released in July 2005 on Sanctuary Records. We did a promotional tour for that, with quite a lot of radio stuff, but we didn’t support the album with a concert tour, because I was out with Black Sabbath doing Ozzfest at the time. It was good to see that it was received very well by the critics and the audience alike. After having been met with terrible reviews and negative articles for most of my career, it shouldn’t have mattered to me that much any more, but it was nice to see so many people appreciating our music that much.

  84

  Entering the Halls of Fame

  We were up for it probably seven or eight times, and on 13 March 2006 we were finally inducted into the American Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. And a couple of months before that we’d already been inducted in the UK Music Hall of Fame.

  When it rains, it pours.

  We were inducted into the UK one in November 2005 at Alexandra Palace in north London. We played ‘Paranoid’ at that ceremony and that went great. Brian May inducted us. There was a bit of a commotion about that, because Sharon wanted Angus Young of AC/DC to do it. I wanted Brian. Then she wanted Angus and Brian to do it together, but Brian just didn’t want to do it that way. I’m glad he stuck to his guns. He wasn’t going to do it and I had to phone him up and said: ‘Please do it. Do it for me.’

  He came and made a great speech, absolutely fantastic. I was really proud of him.

  Ozzy was playing there as well with his band and Angus Young said about three words about that. Well, his first few words were: ‘Hello, can you hear me? Can you hear me?’ He’s probably as good a talker as I am on those bloody occasions.

  We went into this TV station to do an interview right after the presentation, and the bloke said: ‘Last year we had Michael Jackson in here. He came in with his award and when he walked out again he forgot it. I’ve got it in my bathroom at home now.’

  I said: ‘Oh, really? Fancy him doing that!’

  And, blimey, if I didn’t do exactly the same thing. In fact, he probably had mine sitting in his bathroom for a while next to Michael Jackson’s. But I’ve got it back now, so everything is good.

  When we collected our award for the American Hall of Fame, we stayed at the Waldorf Astoria in New York. The event was held in the hotel ballroom. It was great; you could just go downstairs, go to the presentation, collect your award and clear off. Well, supposedly, but you don’t do that, because from then on you go into the different TV stations that are hooked up at the back there to do interviews. In doing so I held on to my award like it was glued to me, because I didn’t want to lose it like I had at the UK Music Hall of Fame.

  When we finally got it after all those years of being nominated, I was really pleased. Ozzy had said some stuff in the past, like: ‘I don’t give a fuck about being inducted.’

  I thought it was a great honour and I am very proud of it.

  They wanted us to play there, but there was some problem so Metallica played instead of us. They did ‘Hole In The Sky’ and ‘Iron Man’. They were really good and they inducted us as well, which was really nice of them. Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield said some wonderful things about us. They are genuine blokes and they do love what we’ve done. In fact, James came along to a few Heaven & Hell gigs later, so he’s a big fan. And in turn I think they are really good. I like them a lot.

  The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame is a funny old do, really, because it gets a bit stuffy. Fortunately we could loosen up a bit with the guys we knew there. And, of course, I loosened up a lot later, when I sat in the bar with Geezer Butler until God knows what time. The next day I felt bloody awful.

  When I left New York about four days after the event, I put my award in my hand baggage, just to make sure I didn’t lose it. It’s a big thing, maybe a foot long, and when I passed security at the airport they said: ‘You can’t take this through.’

  ‘What do you mean? It’s an award!’

  ‘I know, but you could use it as a weapon.’

  I thought, oh no, it’s taken me thirty-eight bloody years to get it, and now they are going to confiscate it. But everything was sorted out and I managed to get it home safe and sound.

  85

  This is for peace

  Towards the end of 2006 I was invited to work with Zemlyane, this Russian band that played the Kremlin. It was their anniversary and they wanted to do ‘Heaven And Hell’ and ‘Paranoid’. I said: ‘I’ll just do “Paranoid”.’

  I just wanted to do something short because I didn’t know who the bloody hell they were, but they’re quite big in Russia and they offered me a fee I couldn’t refuse. Actually, they offered an initial fee and I said to Ralph: ‘I don’t particularly want to do it. Just double it.’

  He doubled it and they said: ‘Okay.’

  So I flew out there. Tony Martin and Glenn Hughes were on as well, and so were Rick Wakeman and his son, Adam, and Bonnie Tyler. The night I got in, the promoter took me out to eat and the amount of drink was lethal. It was all, have another shot of this and a shot of that and fill up and another salute to whoever. After just a few of them I thought, fucking hell, if I did this for a couple of days I wouldn’t survive. I was absolutely legless. I said: ‘I’ve just got to go to bed. I’m playing tomorrow! I’m going.’

  They said: ‘That’s an insult, you know!’

  Oh shit, here we go. And normally I don’t drink shots at all.

  ‘No, no. Have another one!’

  I did. And I didn’t feel all that stunning the next day.

  Before the show I was sitting on my own in the dressing room; there was a knock on the door and this army walked in. About twenty people, with lots of photographers and cameramen and bodyguards – it was absolutely mad. Somebody pinned a medal on me and said: ‘This is for peace.’

  He shook my hand for the cameras and left.

  Shoof – as soon as they’d come in, they’d gone.

  And that was it.

  What happened?

  I never found out who it was. For all I know it was Putin himself.

  Then I did the gig. There were only very wealthy people there, obviously all connected with the government, and they were all dressed up. It was in a small theatre that probably only held 200 people, right there in the Kremlin. To play a gig like that was ever so weird.

  I saw Tony Martin there for the first time since the end of the Forbidden tour, back in 1995. He went on and sang ‘Headless Cross’. It was all right seeing him there, first at the show and then later at the restaurant.

  That restaurant was another matter. They had closed it for regular customers, so it became a private thing for the people connected to the show. We went for lunch there, me, my guitar tech, my assistant and one of the people from the promoter’s office. Apart from us, the place was completely empty. I asked for the wine list and I picked this expensive wine. They brought a bottle of it, poured it, I had a sip and I said to the bloke: ‘This wine is off.’

  The head waiter came up and said: ‘What’s the problem with the wine?’

  ‘It’s off.’

  The look on his face, he was so pissed off!

  ‘It’s not off. It can’t be off!’

  But it was. They probably weren’t used to people spending that sort of money on a bottle of wine. Then they brought another one.

  That was off as well.

  I said to the promoter bloke: ‘I can’t believe it. But don’t say anything. Just leave it. Because the look they gave me the first time!’

  And the waiters probably thought, he’s only had one sip of it . . . extravagant!

  86

  Heaven and Hell, tour and band

  In the autumn of 2006 Ralph told me that the record company wanted to put a package together of stuff from the Dio era. I’d seen Ronnie not long before that at a gig in Birmingham. It had been fifteen years and it was good to see him again. So I said to Ralph: ‘Why don’t we ask Ronnie if he’d be interested in doing two songs especially for this album, just a couple of one-offs?’

>   Ronnie was interested and flew over from California. We sat down in my kitchen, having coffee, and another coffee, trying to get to know each other again. We didn’t want to actually start yet, we were a bit like, oh, yeah, what are we going to do?

  Finally I said: ‘Well, shall we have a go then?’

  ‘Oh. All right.’

  We went into my studio and it just jelled again like it used to. Instead of the two songs the record company wanted, we wrote three. We were in good spirits and feeling productive so we thought, why don’t we do a fast one, a slow one and a mid-tempo one? Something for everybody. The first song we wrote was ‘Shadow Of The Wind’, the slow one. Ronnie came up with the riff and then we added more to it and built it into a song. I came up with the riff for ‘The Devil Cried’. Ronnie had to go back home to LA for a few days and I sent him a rough take of it. He really liked that. And we wrote the fast one, ‘Ear In The Wall’, after he’d come back again. Geezer came over and we demoed the three tracks in the studio at my house.

  I’d always been in contact with Bill and I said to him: ‘Would you be interested in doing these tracks with us?’

  He went: ‘That sounds really good. I’d love to do that!’

  I got him over to England a week before the others came, so that we could run through the ideas and he could get used to playing these songs. I had sent Bill a track about three weeks earlier as well, so he could start working on that. But he obviously hadn’t. Then Ronnie and Geezer arrived. Everybody was getting a bit impatient, because Bill was taking his time. He wanted to analyse everything and try out different things, which is the way he is. It was a bit difficult, because I was being asked: ‘How long is it going to be?’

  All I could say was: ‘I don’t know!’

  Unfortunately we were working to a strict deadline and Ronnie in particular was keen to get going and return home. We talked to Bill about it and suggested a couple of ideas, but he wasn’t happy to play the sort of thing that we were hearing on the tracks. It just didn’t work out. Bill wasn’t going to be the one to play on it. We thought about putting the band back together and touring as well, but Bill said: ‘I don’t particularly want to be doing a lot of shows.’

  It would have been funny for Bill anyway, because a lot of the music we were going to be playing would’ve been new to him, as he’d played on the Heaven and Hell album but Vinny had done Mob Rules and Dehumanizer. Because of all this, we got Vinny in to play on these three tracks instead. And that was it. Ronnie and Geezer went back home and the tracks were added to the album. It came out and the interest was great.

  As soon as promoters heard that we had written three new tracks together, they went: ‘When are you going to tour?’

  We talked about it among ourselves and decided to take it stage by stage. We didn’t want to commit ourselves for years to come. We thought, okay, let’s do a tour and see what happens.

  They booked a tour and we went and did it. By the time The Dio Years came out in April 2007, we were on the road in Canada and the States. It was great and it really went down well. It was the first time in nearly forty years that I was touring under a different name. We didn’t want to call it Black Sabbath, as we had been touring with the Ozzy line-up again as well and we didn’t want to confuse people. We weren’t playing the old stuff either; we stuck to the songs we’d recorded with Ronnie. At first we weren’t going to call ourselves anything and just use our own names, while calling this tour the Heaven and Hell tour. But soon people were calling the band Heaven & Hell and we stuck with that.

  We started with Megadeth and Down with Phil Anselmo, whose spot was taken by Machine Head mid-tour. It went really well. We played more than thirty dates all over America and in May we went over to Europe for summer festivals and arenas. And then we welcomed Down back for two weeks in Australia and New Zealand. Throughout September we toured America again, this time with Alice Cooper and Queensrÿche. We’d known Alice for quite a while and he’s a nice guy. Eric Singer was his drummer at the time. During that tour I saw Alice a couple of times in the lobby of the hotel.

  ‘You’re going out for a bit?’

  ‘Yeah, going to play a round of golf.’

  Finishing in Japan, we were a bit sad that that might be the end. I said to Ronnie: ‘Would you be interested in doing another album?’

  ‘Yeah, I’d love to do that. What about Geezer?’

  ‘We’ll ask.’

  Geezer joined us in this Japanese restaurant and he didn’t last five minutes because he’s a vegan. Of all the places to go with us that was the wrong one, because we were eating raw fish and everything. He only came in for a drink, saw them put all the live shrimps on the grill, got really angry and buggered off.

  But he was up for it, and so was Vinny.

  That settled it: we were going to make another album!

  87

  The Devil You Know

  We didn’t write while we were on the road. I did have an amp in the dressing room and fiddled about a bit and sometimes I’d come up with a couple of riffs, which I then recorded on a little digital machine. I just kept them so that I could go back to them at some point, but it never worked trying to write a proper song while on tour. We never sat down together to do it, simply because we weren’t in each other’s company all that much. Me and Geezer travelled on one bus together and Vinny and Ronnie on another, and we both left at different times. After a gig Geezer and myself would have a shower, get on the bus and go. Ronnie usually stayed behind for a couple of hours because he liked to relax, have a drink and see a few people. Meanwhile, Geezer and me were asleep and on the road. I’m an early riser, but Ronnie would sleep in late. With two different schedules like that, to write a track together was very difficult.

  So after the tour we had writing sessions. I did a lot at home, where I put many riffs down and a lot of the structures of the songs, which I then put on a CD. Ronnie, Geezer and Vinny were at home in California, so I went over there with more than twenty song ideas on this CD. Ronnie had also put his ideas on a CD and so had Geezer. Vinny was very much involved; he sat there tapping away, but he didn’t write as such. We all got together in Ronnie’s house, sat down in his studio and just played the different CDs. We had a drink, casually went through them all and picked out the ideas we instantly liked, no matter whose they were. We put all those on one CD, made a copy of that for everybody, and then we decided which ones we wanted to work on first over the next few days.

  We used one of Ronnie’s ideas in its entirety, which was ‘Atom And Evil’, the first track on the album. And we used bits of each other idea. Some of Geezer’s riffs would come halfway through, or some of mine. We just swapped them around, building songs. It was a great way of working. Instead of having to come up with everything myself, everybody was completely involved in it from day one, and that helped me immensely. We wrote about six songs this way.

  Then we had a break to do an American tour in August 2008, after which we were all fresh and raring to go again for the next batch of songs. We did the same as before: each of us had a writing session on his own. We put our ideas on a CD again, got back together and played the CDs to each other and picked some more tracks to work on.

  When we decided to record ‘Atom And Evil’ because we all liked it so much, Ronnie was quite honoured. He had written the words and the music, but he was very humble. He said: ‘We don’t have to do it.’ And then he added: ‘But if you like it . . .’

  I said: ‘It’s wonderful. It would be a great song to do!’

  When we were in LA putting the songs together, I had a little studio set up in the basement of the house I rented. My engineer, Mike Exeter, was staying at the house as well. We’d put the ideas together at Ronnie’s, and afterwards I’d go back home. The next morning I might tinkle around with it and change the riff. And then later in the day, back at Ronnie’s, I’d say: ‘What about this idea?’ On ‘Bible Black’ I had started off with a riff I’d come up with back home in England, and
then Ronnie had changed this and that around. Then one morning in my little basement studio I changed the riff completely. It worked good and in the end ‘Bible Black’ turned into a great song.

  Not all the songs came from the ideas we already had on our CDs. We came up with ‘The Turn Of The Screw’, ‘Neverwhere’ and ‘Eating The Cannibals’ at Ronnie’s; they were done from scratch right then and there. We didn’t just sit around listening; we had our instruments there and did a fair amount of writing together on the spot. Most of the songs were group efforts. Even the ones that were almost completed when presented to the other band members were changed. We’d move stuff around and put new bits in and add little twists that would make them more interesting. Ronnie might say: ‘What about trying that bit there? And that bit?’

  And we’d try it. It was good because we pushed each other. Instead of going: ‘Eh, all right, that’ll do’, it was: ‘Oh yeah, we can make that better!’

  We got along really well and we became very close, and that helped us while writing the songs. We really homed in on the whole thing.

  Recording The Devil You Know didn’t take long at all. We’d already gone into pre-production in LA. Once we had finished the writing, we rehearsed the songs. We played them and taped them and got them fairly tight. We had a little time off and then everybody came over to the Rockfield Studios in Monmouth, in Wales, where we just played the songs live in the studio. We put them all down in three weeks instead of the five we’d originally planned. I was thrilled. To be able to write like that and get the pre-production done and then go in to play it live, it was absolutely great.

  It wouldn’t be right to be in the studio with no hi-jinks and this time the drummer on the receiving end was Vinny. It was cold, being November, but Vinny was as usual working up a right sweat and at every take his hair was soaked so he’d have a hairdryer next to his kit to dry it whenever there was a break. The thing packed up and he got my Tech, Mike, to repair it and was really pleased when it came back and tested it, no problem. We took a break and while he was gone I couldn’t resist filling it up with talcum powder. Back to work and sure enough, Vinny picks up the dryer, but this time ‘poof ’, instead of a black-haired drummer dressed in a black T-shirt there was now a white apparition! Being Vinny he took it in good spirit.