by Tony Iommi
‘I did!’
‘Well, they want you back because there’s something not working on it, so get over there.’
I’d find out there was nothing wrong with the typewriters, but because I had been chatting them up these girls thought I was going to ask them out. It was fun. It ended because I was getting too many gigs with The Rest and came in late too often, so it was not working out any more.
And after that I never had another job.
10
How three angels saved heavy metal
After I passed my driving test I bought an MGB sports car. I was eighteen or nineteen, I was working and I paid so much towards it every week. My mother never wanted me to have it, because I was a bit frantic in that thing. And I actually had a serious accident in it.
Driving along a dual carriageway I overtook this other car. I looked over and it was a girl driving. And suddenly . . . bang! I’d driven over something and two tyres went and it pulled me straight off the road. I went flying over into some trees and saw the wings coming off the car as I was sitting there. As I remember it, it all happened in slow motion. It sounds mad, but I saw three figures come down, one to the left and two to the right, like angels. And I thought, this is it.
I hit a tree, the car flipped over and I was knocked out. When I came to, I smelled petrol and I thought, fuck, I hope it doesn’t blow up. It was a convertible and it had no roll bars. It was upside down, but I managed to get out because I had landed in soft earth. It was a big drop and I scrambled up to the road. I had concussion and I didn’t know what was going on. Some guy picked me up and apparently I was ranting to him: ‘Don’t tell my parents, don’t tell them!’
The next thing I knew my mum was screaming at me in my hospital bed: ‘You barmy bastard, fancy doing that. You should have never bought that car!’
Bloody hell.
Everybody who saw the car said: ‘You should have been killed.’ They brought the wreck to my house, on a trailer. Mum saw it and just burst out crying. Even the people who towed it said: ‘How the hell did you get out?’
I said: ‘I don’t know.’
I should have been killed, but all I had was concussion. I was bruised a bit, but nothing very serious.
Seeing those three figures, it was so vivid. It made me think, Christ, I’ve been saved here. And saved for a purpose: to do something. Someone once suggested it was to invent heavy metal. What a great purpose. The angels must have said to each other: ‘Oops, that went wrong!’
It took me a while to get back into a car after that. But I had to drive the band’s transit van, so I didn’t have all that much time to get over it. And I did have sports cars again later.
But I don’t look at women now when I overtake them.
11
Things go horribly south up north
After The Rest fell apart I got this offer to join a band called Mythology. They were from Carlisle, then a town of maybe 70,000 people on the border with Scotland, about a three-hour drive from Birmingham. I went up there and Chris Smith came as well, as Mythology also needed a singer. The band had been reduced to Neil Marshall, the bass player and band leader, and a drummer who soon left, so I thought, well, I know a drummer! Enter Bill Ward. Then most of The Rest moved to Carlisle and became Mythology. It was a logical step for us. In Birmingham there was a limit to what we could do, but Mythology was the biggest band up there, so there were gigs to be played.
I’d never been out of bloody Birmingham before, where I was still living with my parents. To move out and live up in Carlisle with the rest of the band was a big step. I didn’t know anybody, so having Chris there, and Bill a little later on, was great. We lived in Compton House, a big place that was divided up into flats. We had a lounge and a little kitchen on the top floor, and a bedroom underneath that we all shared.
The landlady and her daughter also lived in the house, but they weren’t the only ones there. One day we were about to order fish and chips and we counted out how many portions we’d need: ‘You want chips, you want chips, you want chips . . .’
We counted one more than we actually needed, because there was a young boy there who we took into account. I said to Bill: ‘Hang on, did you see that?’
‘Yeah, a boy.’
Blimey, that was weird. It was really puzzling who this lad was. I said to our landlady: ‘It sounds mad, but we think we saw a young boy upstairs.’
She said: ‘Did he look about seven or eight years old?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Oh, he died in the house many years ago.’
She was completely aware of it. He’d had a bad death right there. But he wasn’t the only one. We saw this young girl there as well. Apparently she had drowned in the bath . . .
It didn’t frighten us. If it had been ghosts jumping at us, screaming, we’d have probably shat ourselves, but they were just young kids.
We were fairly careful with what we did there, with the noise and stuff. We got drunk on cheap wine a few times, for which we duly got told off, and we weren’t allowed to bring girls in. No way: women in there? You couldn’t do that! I was twenty years old, and Neil was about twenty-four at the time. His claim to fame was that he used to play with Peter & Gordon. Neil was leading a much more grown up band than The Rest had been. Mythology had its own style. We played more guitar stuff than I was used to, blues with lots of solos. It gave me the opportunity to really start playing, to actually learn to play solos. And as we gained more popularity, I gained more popularity; people liked what I played.
Mythology had a great agent, Monica Lynton, who used to get us quite a bit of work. Of course she would always go: ‘You could play a bit more popular stuff, you know.’
We rehearsed in the lounge, just quietly, to put a song together. But most things we played were covers. We extended them or changed them around a bit, so that we could put a solo in. We’d try it out in the house and then do it during the gig the next night.
We had some blues and rock albums. One record we played a lot was The Moody Blues’ Days of Future Passed, even though we didn’t play any of the songs ourselves. And we had Supernatural Fairy Tales, an album by a band called Art. Their singer, Mike Harrison, later became famous with Spooky Tooth. We certainly played a couple of tracks off that in our set, because they were big up there, so people wanted to hear that.
We played places like the Town Hall in Carlisle, one of those horrible sounding buildings; the Cosmo, the biggest club there, like a big ballroom; and the Globe Hotel on Main Street, a place we later played with Sabbath as well. We did about two or three gigs a week, not just in Carlisle but travelling to Glasgow, Edinburgh, Newcastle and all the little pockets and places in between. We had tough audiences up there. They could drink like Scotsmen and shout like them as well: ‘You know any Rolling Stones? Play some Rolling Stones!’
They fought all the time; that was their night out. Bottles came flying in, but if you stopped playing that would be it: they’d smash your stuff up. So you had to play on, no matter what. It was just like that movie The Blues Brothers: you’d dodge bottles galore. All the audience were fighting and it’d be really ridiculous. Then the next week they’d all be back and everything would be right as rain and they’d be talking and then it would all start over again. It’s weird to see everybody fighting and the girls screaming and girls fighting!
Living away from home, we were free to do and look as we pleased. I started to grow my hair and it just went mad. People would actually be frightened of us, because nobody had long hair like that. Also I had this buckskin jacket that I lived in. I was proud of it and wore it everywhere. Bill Ward took that one step further: he’d wear a T-shirt for I don’t know how many days and go to bed in it. He was a dirty bugger, and he hasn’t changed much since. We actually called him Smelly for many years. We even bought gas masks and wore them when he was there. And Bill went: ‘Hang on a bit!’
The joke backfired on us when we got stopped by the police in Hartlepool. They spotted th
ese gas masks in the back of our van and thought we were going to do a robbery. We got arrested and were hauled off to the police station. Imagine that happening in Park Lane: they would have talked about it for ages.
Up in Carlisle I smoked my first hashish. It made me go weird, almost paranoid. I thought, oh God, I don’t know if I like that. And I sure didn’t like what it would lead to in the end. This dealer came around to the house maybe three times, because Neil would buy a little bit of hash off him. One day this guy, who was from out of town, turned up with these suitcases. He said: ‘Can I leave these here, because I’ve got to do a bit of running around.’
We said yes and never saw him again.
The next morning, around seven o’clock, bang! The police busted the door down and came into our room. They found these suitcases, full of dope.
We were shocked: ‘It’s not ours!’
They locked us up and there was all hell to pay. I was petrified. Oh no, what are Mum and Dad going to think now!
It was actually the first time I had some of my own and it was maybe the third time I had ever smoked it. We tried to explain that the suitcases weren’t ours. They knew that, because they’d been following this guy. That’s what led them to our house. They arrested him but they were still trying to charge us with it, saying: ‘If you don’t tell us what’s going on . . . all this was in your possession, you know!’
They really laid it on and frightened us to death. They separated us and asked us all questions. Of course we were thinking, I wonder what the others have said? Very awkward.
It was splashed all over the newspapers, because it was a big thing then: ‘Band caught with drugs’. It made the national news and also reached Birmingham, so my parents found out. Imagine the neighbours: ‘That Iommi boy is a drug addict!’
I called my mother and she went absolutely potty at me, crying and screaming and shouting: ‘You brought disgrace to this house!’
Sergeant Carlton was the one who busted us. He found out soon enough we weren’t the hardened criminals they were looking for. He helped us sort it out.
The drug fiasco was the main reason Mythology broke up. Getting gigs became difficult, so me and Bill just came back to Birmingham. I had to live at home again. It was embarrassing, but I had nowhere else to go.
Bill and I stuck together. We wanted to start another band, so we looked around for singers. We went into a music shop and we saw this advert saying: ‘Ozzy Zig requires gig, owns his own PA’.
I said to Bill: ‘I know an Ozzy, but it can’t be him.’
We drove around to this address, knocked on the door, his mother answered and we said: ‘Is Ozzy in?’
She said: ‘Yes. Just a minute.’
She turned around and shouted: ‘John, it’s for you.’
And when he came to the door I said to Bill: ‘Oh no, forget it. I know this guy.’
12
Down to Earth
‘What do you mean?’ Bill said.
I said: ‘I know him from school. And as far as I know he isn’t a singer.’
I suppose Ozzy was shocked as well. I hadn’t seen him since school, so the only thing he remembered about me was me going around beating people up. Ozzy is a year younger than me, so he was in a class one year below mine. He always hung around with his friend Jimmy Phillips. Albert and me never associated with them at school.
Me and Bill talked to Ozzy for a bit and then we said: ‘Okay then.’
And off we went and basically forgot about it. A few days later Bill came over to our house and Mum made him a sandwich. Suddenly Ozzy and Geezer turned up, looking for a drummer. I said: ‘Bill is a drummer, but we’re going to stick together. But if Bill wants to do it, fine.’
But Bill said: ‘No, no, I want to stick with Tony.’
I said: ‘Why don’t we all have a go? Get a band and see how it goes.’
We got together for a first rehearsal. Ozzy’s friend Jimmy Phillips was there as well, playing the slide guitar, and some guy was honking away on a saxophone. Geezer was a guitar player but he decided to switch to the bass. Trouble was, he didn’t have a bass and neither did he have the money to buy one. He tuned down his Fender Telecaster, trying to play the bass parts that way for that one rehearsal. I thought, oh blimey! To my relief he then went and borrowed a Hofner bass off his old band later. He only had three strings on that, but he only played one string then anyway.
We rehearsed some blues stuff, did a few songs and called ourselves The Polka Tulk Blues Band. Jimmy Phillips and me were going to try and get some gigs. We were in our lounge with the phone on the boxes and I said: ‘Well, Jimmy, you phone this one, this Spotlight Entertainment sounds interesting.’
He phoned up and he went: ‘Can I speak to Mr Spotlight please?’
We started laughing and that was the end of that. Just disastrous. I then called Mythology’s agent Monica Lynton up in Carlisle, saying: ‘We’ve got this band, give us a try.’
She said: ‘Okay, but you’ve got to play some Top 20 stuff, in order to get away with playing some blues.’
‘Okay, okay.’
Off we went to Carlisle. Near there, in a place called Egremont, we played at the Toe Bar. This big Scottish bloke came up to me and said: ‘Yer singer is crap!’
‘Ah, right. Thanks.’
We must have looked a right bloody bunch: me in my buckskin jacket, Bill in his smelly gear and then there was Ozzy who had shaved his head bald. Geezer wore a long Indian hippie dress. Peace, man, and all that stuff. I thought, that’s weird, a bloke in a dress. What have I let myself in for?
Geezer dated this girl who lived down the road from our shop, so I saw him walking past a lot. I saw him more often when I was in a band that played at this nightclub and Geezer’s band, Rare Breed, played there as well. You’d see him crawling up walls, because he did acid in those days. I thought he was a loon.When we played the Globe Hotel in Carlisle, some idiot came in who had already knocked a couple of policemen out and killed one of their dogs. We were getting the equipment out, Geezer was coming down the stairs in his hippy clothes carrying a couple of guitars and this guy came after him: ‘You-ou-ou-aargh!!’
Geezer went: ‘Huh!’
He let go of the guitars and shouted: ‘Don’t hit me, man, I’m peaceful!!’
And then he ran. It was unbelievable, this completely frantic big bloke running after Geezer and Geezer in his kaftan trying desperately to get away from him. It took a whole gang of policemen to get the bloke down and to jail. Bloody hell: what a great way to start off with a new band!
It didn’t last that long with Jimmy Phillips and this saxophone player. There would be a solo and everybody would be playing it at the same time. It was a right row. These two guys just seemed to do this for a bit of a laugh, and that upset me. I had a little meeting with Bill, Geezer and Ozzy and said: ‘The sax player doesn’t really work and neither does Jimmy Phillips.’
They said: ‘What do you want to do?’
We didn’t want to hurt anybody’s feelings by firing them, so we told them we were breaking up. After that we didn’t see each other for a couple of days and then we got back together with just the four of us.
Those first gigs were crap. This band was not nearly as good as Mythology, but I said: ‘Give it time, it will be all right.’
I could see there was some potential. It was an odd combination: somebody I knew from school who I didn’t get along with back then; Geezer, who was from another planet; and me and Bill, who were probably from another planet as well. But it all seemed to jell. We rehearsed and rehearsed and did a few gigs and things started working for us.
We dropped the name The Polka Tulk Blues Band and changed it to Earth Blues Band, which quickly turned into Earth. We were doing twelve-bar blues, Ten Years After-type stuff. I just liked anything with guitar. We had blues albums by artists I’d never heard of, but there would be a guitar solo on one of them and we’d go: ‘Ah, we’ll do this track, it’s good, another twelve-bar!’
The guitar work became more jazzy and Bill really liked big band music, so we also went into more jazzy stuff. Ozzy was doing that fine. I used to be on at him a lot, because at first he didn’t know what to do. I was always saying: ‘Go on, talk to the audience, say this, say that.’
And Geezer learned to play the bass very quickly: before you knew it he was playing away. But because we played the blues, we didn’t work a lot. In Birmingham soul was big then, so there were only a couple of places where we could play. For us, Mothers club was probably the best venue in Birmingham. We played it, but I also saw Chicken Shack, Jon Hiseman’s Colosseum and Free there. The Town Hall had a funny sound, but we played that a few times as well. In fact the Volume 4 album’s inside cover has a picture of us performing there. A lot of places we played at were in pubs, where they’d have this big room that they didn’t use, and so they’d rent it out to somebody who’d organise a gig in there. Like Jim Simpson, who rented a room over a pub in the centre of Birmingham and called it Henry’s Blues House. He had it maybe a couple of nights a week, but it became very popular.
Because the stages were so small, we all kind of grouped together. Ozzy hovered in front of me somewhere, but later, when we got to the bigger stages, he stood to the left in front of my stack and I moved to the middle of the stage. Don’t ask me why, I never knew. It seemed weird, but I liked it: centre stage was the best spot to hear how everything sounded. It stayed that way until we broke up. Ozzy only went to the middle when we got back together many years later, in the nineties.
The first thing the band bought was a huge Commer van with blacked-out windows. It was a wreck, an ex-police van that had a great big hole in the floor on the passenger side. I once used the van to pick up this girl. We had put a carpet over the hole, trying to do it up a bit. She came out all dolled up, stockings on, climbed in the van, and went straight through the floor. The metal ripped her stockings and cut her leg. So that was the end of that romance.
