Iron Man: Black Sabbath's Tony Iommi on his life in music

With Black Sabbath finally finished, legendary guitarist Tony Iommi is preparing to look back over a storied career as a heavy metal pioneer

Feature by Joe Goggins | 02 Oct 2018

It’s been about a year and a half since Tony Iommi began to slow down, and it sounds as if it’s suiting him.

Black Sabbath wrapped up their last ever world tour with an emotionally charged homecoming arena show in Birmingham on 4 February 2017. It was a triumph for the band, but for Iommi, there was an additional resonance; that he never knew whether he’d be given the chance to bring the band to a natural conclusion. In early 2012, with the first tour in seven years in the diary, he was diagnosed with lymphoma, forcing Sabbath to nix most of their European dates; at the pair that they did play, a headline show at Download Festival after a warm-up club gig in Birmingham, had Iommi looking visibly frail.

Still, they don’t call him Iron Man for nothing, and he worked his treatment plan around the band, flying back to the UK every six weeks and keeping the show on the road in-between. Starting at the beginning of 2013, he undertook two massive world tours with Sabbath, totalling 149 gigs over five continents. By the summer of 2016, his cancer was in remission, and he was able to round out the final shows free of the disease, albeit under regular medical monitoring. It was, for Iommi time to quit while he was ahead.

"It was getting to the point where I knew I couldn’t do it for too much longer," he explains. "The constant travel, the long-haul flights, the late nights when you’re not getting to bed until five in the morning – none of that was particularly good for somebody with the illness that I had, in terms of the way it affects the blood cells. It was time to take it a little bit easier, although I’ve not had as much of a rest as I thought I was going to get since that last show."

Iommi has been keeping himself busy. He’s heavily involved in fundraising for cancer charities since his battle with the disease, and with the knowledge that he can now be a homebody for the foreseeable future for the first time in decades he’s rekindled an old indulgence; collecting cars, a hobby that began in the seventies but was curtailed when Sabbath began touring heavily. He’s also been thinking about new music.

"I’ve got designs on doing some more recording," he says. "The beauty of the band coming to an end is that I can go into the studio at my leisure now. There’s no rush; if I want to head down there for a couple of hours then I can, and if I come out with nothing that’s OK too. When I get the chance I’m going to sit down, pick out some of these ideas I’ve got, mark some of the others off and then see where they take me. I’d like to do another instrumental album and I’d like to do another solo album. I just don’t know what it’ll be yet."

Also imminent is his return to the stage; later this month he’ll head north of the border for two shows billed as A Life in Music which will see him sitting down in front of audiences in Paisley and Edinburgh to discuss his career with broadcaster and journalist Phil Alexander. For Iommi, a keen storyteller who relished the experience of writing his 2011 memoir Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath, the evenings will represent a welcome return to the spotlight.

"I’ve missed being on stage and looking out at an audience, to be honest," he says. "I never fell out of love with playing; that was always my favourite side of my life as a musician. This, for me, is a version of that to be communicating with people that way again. I’ve got no idea in advance what Phil might be planning to ask me and that’s a great dynamic because he’s incredibly knowledgeable about my work – maybe even more so than I am!"

He feels he has another book in him too, especially after the publishers of Iron Man cut swathes of material from an autobiography that still ran to nearly 450 pages. Before then though there are other musical endeavours to attend to. Iommi was always the beating heart of Sabbath in the studio, wanting to remain across all aspects of the band’s recorded work, and that continued up to the very end – he was instrumental in devising The Angelic Sessions, the group’s last ever recordings that features in the live film The End of the End.

"That helped to provide a sense of closure," Iommi says of the sessions, which birthed rare versions of the likes of Sweet Leaf, Tomorrow’s Dream and Changes. "We would have liked to have played those songs on tour but you can’t expect Ozzy [Osbourne] to be able to do that every single night because the vocal parts are really high in pitch in places. That’s no disrespect to Ozzy, because every singer goes through that, especially at our age. It was my idea for us to capture those songs and I think it turned out really nicely."

Even with Sabbath officially over, Iommi is continuing to tinker with the back catalogue. His next project will be to remix and remaster Forbidden, the band’s penultimate album from 1995 that was recorded with Tony Martin on vocals. Improbably, the record was a collaboration with rapper Ice-T and his own heavy metal outfit Body Count; guitarist Ernie C took on production duties while Ice-T himself makes a guest appearance on the record’s opening track, The Illusion of Power. Iommi has never hidden his dissatisfaction with the result, but only now is he doing something about it.

"I don’t think any of us were happy with the sound of it at the time," he recalls. "I’ve been pulling it apart recently with my engineer of many years, Mike Exeter. It definitely wasn’t mixed properly and the sound quality isn’t great. At the time we were under pressure from the record company to bring in fresh blood on the production side, and we went along with it, which was difficult for me because it was all taken out of my hands. No disrespect to those guys – they were really pleased with it – but I'm going to improve the sound of it and make my guitar bigger."

Iommi still wants to return to the stage intermittently; he recently suggested he’d be open to a one-off reunion with Sabbath in 2022 to open the Commonwealth Games in Birmingham, all still being well. With Osbourne’s own solo tour – again, ostensibly his last – set to stretch well into 2019, it looks as if none of the band’s individual members are ever going to put their feet up; there’s a sense we haven’t heard the last of Sabbath. "Honestly, I never thought about how quickly the end was coming when we were playing those final dates," says Iommi. "None of us were, really. Nobody was counting the shows down, and it was only in the middle of that show in Birmingham that I finally realised, 'Blimey! This really is it!' I’d certainly consider doing occasional things if the timing was right. I have to be doing something musically – I can’t just sit around, and actually, since we stopped I haven’t!"


Tony Iommi in conversation with Phil Alexander: A Life in Music takes place at The Spree Festival, Paisley, 12 Oct; Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh, 13 Oct

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