How Tony Iommi got his electric guitar tone in Black Sabbath is the stuff of legend. It is the origin stories of origin stories.

There was the brutal machining injury to his fretting hand, requiring the use of thimbles to play again. If Django Reinhardt was an inspiration, the determination to continue came from within. Iommi sized down his electric guitar strings, mixing them with super-light banjo strings to go easier on his fingers. He would arrive at his downtuning epiphany soon enough...

Initially, Iommi played a Fender Strat. He had tracked Wicked World with one before it crapped out and he switched to the SG. Happenstance, a quirk of fate, and lo, Iommi would go on to become one of the most famous SG players.

Like most players, Iommi was an early adopter of Marshall amps. But a local amp builder by the name of Lyndon Laney made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. There began a lifelong collaboration and lifelong friendship until Laney’s passing in April 2026.

“I think I was using Marshall early on, and then Laney on the first album, but when we first wrote [Black Sabbath] songs I was using a Marshall 50-watt,” Iommi told MusicRadar in 2010. “I switched to Laney because they started up around the same time as us and they’re a Birmingham company. To be honest, they offered to give us all this gear when nobody else did. What do you say to that? ‘OK!’ So I used them.”

He had found the Gibson SG. He had found a way of playing that circumvented his injury. He now had the amp. What tied it all together was a piece of kit he was introduced to in 1968, the year before Black Sabbath formed, when he was cutting his teeth in Mythology. A drugs bust over some hashish in their practice space brought fines upon on Mythology. The band soon split.

We have to remember that this was a different time. When you went into a guitar store, there was no pedal cabinet. Okay, you might have been able to pick up a Maestro FZ-1 Fuzz-Tone, but most players faced the similar conundrum; if you wanted distortion, you got it the old-fashioned way, you turned your amp up.

But someone turned Iommi onto a unit that sat on top of your amplifier and worked some magic with it. Enter, the Dallas Rangemaster…

“When I lived in Cumberland, when we did the Mythology thing, there was a guy up there and I used to use his treble booster called a [Dallas] Rangemaster to give my sound a bit more oomph,” recalled Iommi. “A guy from another band up there said, ‘I can make that sound better for you’. So he took it off me and brought it back the next day.”

This was a febrile era for homespun guitar electronics. If something didn’t sound quite right, there was always someone who had a soldering iron, a handful of spare transistors and capacitors, and some ideas on how the circuit could be improved.

In this case, Iommi had the guitarist of Spooky Tooth, Luther Grosvenor, on hand to give him exactly what he needed. It worked gangbusters with his Laney tube amp, and better still, no one had one like it.

“I don’t know what he did to it, but it was really good,” said Iommi. “I used that treble booster on all the early Sabbath albums and put it into the Laney because it boosted the input and gave it the overdrive I was looking for, which amps in the early days didn’t have.”

Other gizmos would enter the picture. In 1970, when he tracked the solo to Paranoid under the watchful eye of producer Rodger Bain, Iommi applied a ring modulator to the solo. Iommi would become a fan of the Tychobrahe Parapedal wah pedal. His touring rig grew, and for the post-reunion Sabbath shows it is monstrous, controlled by a custom Pete Cornish routing and control unit. But this this modded Range Master was the secret sauce to Iommi’s sound.

Not everyone appreciated it. Iommi’s good friend Brian May of Queen also used the Rangemaster, having watched Rory Gallagher use one. He understood its appeal and urged Iommi to stick with it even if other people in the band and crew would complain about its eccentricities. It wasn’t unknown for the Rangemaster to have a Spinal Tap air base moment onstage.

“I used to rely on Brian a lot because I’d constantly have problems with people saying there was too much interference coming through my booster,” said Iommi, speaking to Guitar World in 2024. “I’d have to explain, ‘I know, but that’s part of my sound!’ In them days, you’d pick up bloody taxis and everything. There was no isolation. Brian would back me up and say, ‘That’s the sound – don’t change it.’

“Sometimes you’d get some boffin come along telling me, ‘I can get rid of that for you,’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, can you?’ But it would always change the sound and I didn’t want my sound to change. The only person who understood how I felt in those days was Brian, because he had the same problem. We both had a bit of noise but were ultimately getting the sound we wanted.”

Iommi used that same modded Rangemaster right up into the Heaven And Hell era, when Iommi started experimenting with Marshalls in his rig, with the late John ‘Dawk’ Stillwell working on his amps.

Stillwell famously designed Joey DeMaio of Manowar’s bass guitar, and had worked with Ronnie James Dio in his Elf days before doing jobs for Rainbow and Deep Purple.

Stillwell knew his stuff but made a grave mistake with Iommi’s rig.

“I used that treble booster up until 1979 when I had a guy come in to build me some Marshalls,” said Iommi, in his 2010 MusicRadar interview. “They gave me a whole stack of Marshalls and this guy came in and rebuilt them. In the meantime, while he was building these things, he threw my treble booster away. I didn’t know until it came to the time when I was looking for it and he said, ‘Oh that? I threw it away. It was crap.’”

Iommi was devasted.

“I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve never seen it from that day on and my amps didn’t sound right without it.”

There are no shortage of treble booster clones. In 2001, Analog Man’s Mike Piera sent Iommi the company’s first Beano Boost. Iommi’s signature Laney amps have their own boost section.

But the Rangemaster behind Iommi’s Black Sabbath tone has long been consigned to landfill, and only one man knows the real secret of what went in that Dallas Rangemaster all those years ago…

Swedish indie band The Cardigans have been quiet for some time – they last released an album back in 2005. But they’re playing some comeback gigs this summer and singer Nina Persson has been talking to the Guardian about one curious aspect of their career: their penchant for Black Sabbath covers.

They did two, in fact. Sabbath Bloody Sabbath on their 1995 breakthrough album Life, and Iron Man on the follow-up, First Band On The Moon. Why asked why they chose to cover Sabbath, Persson explained: “We were big fans – for a heavy band there’s a real pop sentiment in the songwriting – and I think it’s interesting when a cover is a stretch away from your natural sound. As a woman, I thought singing a song done by very manly men gave it a wonderfully creepy aspect.”

“Ozzy (Osbourne) came to see us in Los Angeles and said it was the creepiest thing he’d ever heard, which coming from him is the biggest compliment.”

And they weren’t the end of The Cardigans’ dabblings in the world of hard rock. They covered another Ozzy song – his Blizzard Of Ozz single Mr Crowley - and Thin Lizzy’s The Boys Are Back In Town as B-sides in the mid-1990s.

Persson also talked about her experience with dealing with cervical cancer in the Noughties.” Until I was around 30, I’d hardly ever had a cold, so it was really weird at that age to face something with a possibly deathly outcome. My cancer was operable – I didn’t have to deal with chemo and stuff or get very very ill.”

“I think the consolation prize for any kind of suffering is that you can appreciate things – art, for example – in a different way. You realise these things can happen to anyone. I’ve had 15 or 20 years of thinking ‘I’ve beaten cancer’ but now I’m over 50 I’m thinking: it can totally happen to me again.

The singer said back in 2023 that the Cardigans wouldn’t add to their catalogue, but Persson did mention it may be a possibility once more. “We have logistics issues – families, day jobs – but do toy with the idea of making new music, whether as the Cardigans or in a different form. We’re all capable of making great music, and lately it’s been inspiring to see people like Suede from the 90s making new material. It’s not cringey middle-aged dudes looking hard in leather jackets,” she insisted. “It’s really good stuff.”

For Pantera singer Phil Anselmo, touring as the opening act for Black Sabbath in 1999 was a dream come true.

The Texan band were the main support as Sabbath performed in US arenas with their original line-up of Ozzy Osbourne on vocals, Tony Iommi on guitar, Geezer Butler on bass and Bill Ward on drums.

In an interview with Kerrang!, Anselmo loudly proclaimed: “I’m the biggest Sabbath fan on this tour!”

Five years earlier, Pantera had demonstrated their love for Black Sabbath on their seventh studio album Far Beyond Driven, which featured a cover version of Planet Caravan, a track from Sabbath’s 1970 masterpiece Paranoid.

As Anselmo told Kerrang!, Paranoid was the album that blew his mind when he was a school kid.

“I was 14 years old when I heard the Paranoid album at a buddy of mine’s house, and I didn’t know what happened to me,” Anselmo recalled. “Then weed gets into the mix, and if you smoke weed you end up enjoying Black Sabbath more than anything.”

His obsession with the band peaked when he found a copy of their 1975 cult classic Sabotage.

He revealed: “When I heard the Sabotage album it was over, man! It’s all I listened to. I couldn’t not listen to that record! I had to hear it every day, every waking moment.

“I was at school supposedly trying to get a fucking education and all I could think about was that album. Black Sabbath are the gods, man!”

He named his two favourite songs from Sabotage as Supertzar and The Thrill Of It All.

He cited Sabbath’s self-titled debut album as the perfect illustration of Ozzy Osbourne’s prowess as a vocalist.

“You listen to that first fucking Sabbath album, man! His voice is so hoarsely beautiful, and he nails everything so hard, I can’t even believe it. I’m stoned an amazed and gasping for air!”

Anselmo also hailed a number of Norwegian black metal bands as saviours of heavy music in the ’90s.

“I think that no matter what the fuck ever happens, underground heavy metal is always there,” he said. “It’s reached tremendous proportions due to the Norwegian bands – Emperor, Mayhem, Immortal and the kings, Darkthrone.

“They had a vision and stayed true. And I think that Pantera have really stayed true to ourselves, our fans – and there’s nothing else you can call this music but heavy metal, so we’ve been true to heavy metal!”

Sharon Osbourne has revealed her plan to relaunch Ozzfest, the long-running travelling heavy metal festival led by her late husband Ozzy.

In a new interview with Billboard, Osbourne explains: “I’ve been talking to Live Nation about bringing [Ozzfest] back recently. It was something Ozzy was very passionate about: giving young talent a stage in front of a lot of people.

“We really started metal festivals in this country. It was [replicated but] never done with the spirit of what ours was, because ours was a place for new talent. It was like summer camp for kids.”

In its heyday, Ozzfest bills featured heavyweight acts including Slipknot, Pantera, Marilyn Manson, Tool, Incubus, Linking Park, Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, Megadeth, Motörhead and many more.

Ozzy headlined with his solo band and with the reunited Black Sabbath.

“All of the creative direction for visuals at Ozzfest was mine,” Sharon Osbourne tells Billboard. “I can’t sing a note — I’m tone-deaf — but I can be creative, and I like to create things.”

She also says that the new Ozzfest could be up and running in 20227 and would go beyond metal: “I’d like to mix up the genres,” she explains.

In addition, Osbourne reveals she is also working with Live Nation on a tour in which Black Sabbath’s music will be performed by classic orchestras.

What do you get the guitarist who has everything? Let’s just assume they have already got their own Gibson (and Epiphone) signature guitars. They already have their own custom-wound electric guitar pickups (Gibson again).

What if they have actually heaved heavy metal into existence, and have pretty much seen it all?

This festive season, Brian May had this exactly problem when thinking of a suitable Christmas gift for his best pal, Tony Iommi; and he found the perfect gift. He got the Black Sabbath guitarist and godfather of heavy metal a master-built left-handed version of the Red Special, the electric guitar May built with his father when he was starting out and has used almost exclusively ever since – only this Red Special comes with some choice customisations, as per Iommi’s preferences.

Overseeing the build was Andrew Guyton, of Guyton Guitars, who has first-hand experience with the O.G. Red Special, having been tasked with refurbishing it. Guytone has been making officially authorised replicas of it since 2003, and he infused this Queen guitar with some classic Sabbath DNA.

“It’s built with the exact vintage construction of Brian May’s original Red Special, but shaped to match Tony’s iconic Jaydee Old Boy neck,” explains Guyton.

Like May, Iommi is a big fan of the Dallas Rangemaster treble booster. It was a huge part in finding his sound. Guytone has taken all of this into account. “[It] features a built-in treble booster and authentic vintage-style pots and pickups to replicate the classic tone,” he adds.

All that is missing is a Vox AC30 – and maybe a Maestro Echoplex – and you have Brian May’s tone, all in one guitar, but with the feel of one of the most legendary metal guitars of all time, the Jaydee Old Boy.

The Old Boy built by John Diggins in the late 1970s and was first used by Iommi to record overdubs on Black Sabbath’s 1980 studio album, Heaven & Hell. Soon after, it became his number one electric.

A second-gen SG-style electric, it reflected Iommi’s changing tastes, from the big stuff (the pickups, the 24-fret neck) to the small but significant details, such as the strap button being moved from the top horn to the neck heel, a feature that now all Gibson SGs share.

Old Boy’s distressed finish could be said to be ahead of the curve. But that was just an accident.

Diggins had made this guitar on his kitchen table. The finish didn’t cure properly. Oh, and someone left it in a car in a baking hot day.

“It wasn’t forced. It wasn’t made to look like that,” said Iommi, in the official Tony Iommi website. “It had nice paintwork when I first had it, and it just fell away. One of the stupid things was leaving it in the boot of a car in the States, and the heat made all the paintwork start bubbling – that’s what started the relic look.”

Chances are Iommi won’t be leaving his new Red Special in the boot of the car. This one is a keeper. “Huge thanks to my best friend Brian May and master builder Andrew Guyton for this incredible left-handed Red Special replica,” wrote Iommi. “Andrew personally delivered it last week — a true gift from Brian, two years in the making. Christmas came early!”

Festive, heartwarming, we love it. And maybe these two legends should put these guitars to work in the studio some time soon.

Nuno Bettencourt reveals he quiet quit his set with Jake E Lee at Black Sabbath tribute show Back To The Beginning in order to let the former Ozzy Osbourne guitarist take the limelight.

Speaking to Guitar World, Bettencourt said they were playing Shot In The Dark, or at least he was scheduled to be playing on it, when the Extreme guitarist decided that, all things considered, Lee had it covered. This was a moment the spotlight could belonged to him

“ I didn’t tell anybody I was doing it – but I just walked off the stage,” says Bettencourt. “I wanted Jake to have his moment without another guitar player stealing his thunder.”

Whether it was Lee, Randy Rhoads, Zakk Wylde, Gus G or whoever, the Ozzy Osbourne gig was always a single-player game. Coming from a band like Extreme, in which Bettencourt’s electric guitar has the run of the place, he understood that implicitly.

“We all came from one-guitar bands. We didn’t want rhythm guitarists,” says Bettencourt. “I wanted Jake to have his one moment up there by himself, so I just left. And Jake nailed it.”

If Back To The Beginning was the all-star all-dayer to end them all, then Lee’s performance was one of redemption – it was the ultimate comeback. It was only in October 2024, when Lee was shot three times while out walking his dog, Coco, in Las Vegas. He is lucky to be alive. He also hadn’t been in contact with Ozzy for a number of years but when Back To The Beginning’s musical director Tom Morello called the answer was always going to be yes.

That said, it wasn’t easy. Not only was Lee recovering from being shot, he is dealing with arthritis. Like former Deep Purple guitarist Steve Morse, Lee has had to reimagine his playing in recent years. His self-confidence has taken a knock.

Bettencourt says that Morello contacted him saying that Lee was not sure he wanted to play the solo to The Ultimate Sin – would he do the honours instead? But there was no way Bettencourt was going to agree to that.

“We all know that, as legendary as Jake is, he’s struggling a little bit, as we all do as we get older and don’t know what’s going to happen to our hands and bodies,” he says. “I told Tom, ‘Give me his phone number right now.’ I texted Jake and told him, ‘You are fucking Jake E. Lee. There’s no way in hell I’m taking that solo. You’re going to play that solo. And not only that, I’ll double it with you, and we’ll do it together. Whatever happens, it’s going to be fucking incredible,’ and that’s what we did.”

Bettencourt and Lee got on like a house on fire. Game recognises game. But Bettencourt did have a bone to pick with Lee. He was “so fucking humble” for a player who took on the hardest job in rock-and-metal, following Randy Rhoads.

“I told him, ‘You’re fucking Jake E. Lee!’ Not only did he replace Randy, but he took Ozzy to another place,” says Bettencourt.

You can read Bettencourt’s interview in the latest issue of Guitar World – subscribe and save.

Ashdown and Reverb.com have teamed up for the ultimate limited edition second hand bass amp sale, with 15 of Geezer Butler’s Head Of Doom heads from the rehearsals for Black Sabbath’s final show being sold exclusively via the online gear retail giant.

Butler has signed each of the control panels in silver marker pen, with each amp shipping with a certificate of authenticity from Ashdown’s managing director Dan Gooday.

“This is your chance to own the sound that defined heavy metal,” says Reverb. “Don’t wait, once they’re gone, they’re gone.”

They Reverb marketing bumf couldn’t say it any plainer; this is a unique opportunity to own a piece of heavy metal history, and, y’know, an amp that should make your intro to N.I.B. really come alive.

Butler used these amps in the run-up to July's Back To The Beginning show at Villa Park, when Black Sabbath bowed out with a four-song set, War Pigs, N.I.B., Iron Man and Paranoid bringing down the curtain on the career of a band that invented heavy metal from the ground up, closing what was arguably the biggest metal all-day of all time.

This was Villa Park at capacity, with the show streamed online to more than five million people. Metallica, Slayer, Guns N’ Roses, Tool, Pantera, Gojira, Alice In Chains, plus various supergroups assembled by the musical director for the day, Tom Morello, rolled in. Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne played a solo set. It was all going on.

The estimates as to how much was raised for charity vary. Sharon Osbourne scotched rumours that circa $190mn was raised but a number of millions was raised for local children’s hospitals, Parkinson’s research and other causes.

As for the Head Of Doom itself, this is a built-to-order, UK made Custom Shop build, priced ordinarily at £1,499. It has a 9-band EQ, a Sub-Harmonic Generator, and (this is too cool) a Doom control.

Butler's tech, Terry Welty was closely involved in the design, and upon its unveiling in 2018, Gooday said it was a proud day in his career.

“What a moment for me personally. Having grown up playing Sabbath with a band in school and learning all the bass lines with my mate Phil, who could play any guitar lick back after hearing it once," he said. "Geezer’s sound and tone was part of my bass upbringing and has stayed with me until this very day."

There are 600-watts under the hood. The pre-amp is driven by a 12AX7 for that old analogue grit. And those VU meters on the front panel always makes Ashdown amps look the part, too.

You will need something to play it through. Ashdown has the thing, and will be taking orders for the 2x15” and 2x12” ‘Cabinets of Doom’, the COD-212-8 and COD-215-8.

These are rated at 300 watts RMS at 8 Ohms and look the exactly the same as Butler’s originals because they are built the same, made to order in the UK, and featuring the custom medal grille that comes screen-printed with Butler’s artwork.

And if all of this is a little steep for your budget, remember, Ashdown does the Hand Of Doom pedal.

For more details, head over to Reverb.

• Note: this article originally stated these Hand Of Doom amps were the same as those used at Villa Park during Black Sabbath's set. But Reverb has since clarified that they were used for the rehearsals.

There are not one, but two Ozzy Osbourne documentaries heading towards your screens in the first week of October.

First up, there’s Paramount+’s Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape From Now. Directed by BAFTA winner Tania Alexander, it was filmed over the past six years and shows Ozzy’s fight to return to the live stage for one last show, even as he battles Parkinson’s and other injuries.

Family members, collaborators and friends all contribute, and the doc’s talking heads include many of those who played at the Back To The Beginning show in July, including Tom Morello, Billy Corgan, Duff McKagan, James Hetfield, Chad Smith, Robert Trujillo and, of course, Tony Iommi and Zakk Wylde.

A trailer has been put online, which includes a killer opening line from a visibly frail Ozzy: “I used to take pills for fun. Now I take them to stay alive”.

The doc was never meant as a posthumous tribute, though as Paramount Plus say in a press statement, that is how it has ended up: “Following his death on July 22, 2025, the documentary now stands as a testament to Ozzy’s courage, wit, determination and talent — qualities that ensure he remains a hero to millions around the world.”

Meanwhile the BBC have confirmed a new broadcast date for their doc, Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home. This was meant to have been screened in mid August but was postponed with the BBC saying that it was "respecting the family's wishes to wait a bit longer before airing this very special film".

It is now set to go out on BBC1 and iplayer on Thursday 2 October at 9pm. The updated synposis for the doc describes it as "candid and moving portrait of one of Birmingham's favourite sons, and the remarkable relationship with Sharon".

It shows how Osbournes faced "a monumental battle, both on a professional and personal level" to defy his health problems to move home and to stage the final gig.

"But Ozzy has never been a man to take no for an answer, and with Sharon's support he sets about achieving his goals with the determination, blistering honesty and razor-sharp sense of humour that have endeared him to millions for over 50 years.

"He will stop at nothing to make his body work as well as it used to, with the film capturing remarkable levels of resolve."

The Paramount Plus doc No Escape From Now is set to drop a few days later, on Tuesday 7 October.

What is it?

As Black Sabbath say goodbye, Tony Iommi's guitar story continues – and the return of his signature humbucker is great news for those of us looking for some added Ironman in our diets, without stumping up for a full-blown signature guitar.

Tony Iommi’s return as a Gibson signature artist actually came about as a result of these pickups, after the request came in for Gibson to make him some more bespoke humbuckers. Things moved on from there and restarted officially with production models based on Iommi's first "Monkey" SG Special starting in 2020.

Those models stayed authentic to the original with P-90s. But the Black Sabbath legend has previous form when it comes to signature humbucker pickups with Gibson – his was the first signature humbucker set launched back in 1997, based on a design he was using in his UK-made Jaydee guitars. Ten years later Iommi put his name to another first with the first Epiphone signature model, an ebony version of the G-400 – and its Sabbath crucifix inlays weren’t the only notable addition.

“I insisted they put my signature pickups on it,” Iommi told me in 2011. “Which were expensive really to go on that, but I didn’t want them to just put my name on the guitar and that was it. I wanted it to be at least something that I’d use. And that was my deal all along with Gibson.”

The guitarist has carried that commitment on for his return to the Gibson fold, and now players have the chance to upgrade their own SGs (other guitar models are available) with his current choice. But Iommi’s tone has undeniably changed over the years, so where do his humbucker sit as an option for other players as well as those compelled by the power of the tritone?

Specs

• Launch price: $229/£199
• Type: Alnico 2 / ceramic humbucker pickup
• Features: Four conductor wiring as standard, wax potted,
• Contact: Gibson

Build

The thoughtful folks at Gibson UK have saved me getting my trusty ol' soldering iron out by sending an Epiphone SG with the Iommi pickups preinstalled. I specifically asked for this model from the “Inspired By Gibson” Standard range rather than a full-fat Gibson SG Standard because ickups are the obvious upgrade choice for more affordable guitars. Though I’ve been mightily impressed with the stock Probuckers I’ve encountered from the Epiphone range.

With no visible polepieces like most Gibson ‘buckers, the look is more sleek and minimalist for the chrome covers – but the construction here is different too.

Under the cover is a combination of Alnico II and ceramic magnets with blades rather than pole pieces designed to offer a more consistent sound for the magnetic field when Iommi is bending strings. Something that plays a huge role in Sabbath songs such as Iron Man and Into The Void.

The other key requirements for Iommi were sustain and clarity in the high-gain scenarios he thrives in. There were also distinct needs that have been consistent through his career; “We had to make sure it worked with my light gauge strings and low tunings, but still pack a punch,” notes the man himself. “The result has got some serious output.”

With this in mind the humbucker is waxed potted and epoxied to prevent a feedback fest at high gain and volumes, and the 15.7k pickup (our reading) features four-conductor wiring for series, parallel, and split coil options if the player desires. Notably, there is no Iommi humbucker ‘set’ available to buy – the pickups I have here are the same, designed for bridge or neck positions just like Iommi has.

Sounds

Alongside the Epiphone SG Standard I have some added context with an Epiphone SG Modern and my own 2005 Faded Special (with a stock 490T humbucker in the bridge and a Seymour Duncan ‘59 I installed in the neck). I need to get around to installing a JB in the bridge, but maybe this pickup might present serious competition for the slot?

Iommi’s origins lie in the bite and punch of the P-90 from his original “Monkey” 1964/’65 SG Special, and there’s an unmistakable growl to the midrange of the bridge here that feels linked to Sabbath’s trailblazing early ‘70s era. But compared to my own SG Special and the Modern Gibson has loaned us for ProBucker comparison, the highs sound a little rolled off from the Iommi pickup and it makes for a distinct sound that is much more obviously reminiscent of Iommi’s own lead tone than even I was expecting. It’s also quite appealing for a lower gain crunch blues tone through a UA Lion '68 Plexi modelling amp pedal.

Moving back to the SG Modern's ProBuckers and the difference is stark; the Iommi is so much more focussed and articulate compared. The low end is tighter for palm muting and it’s a real upgrade to the Modern for power chord-based playing because the highs aren’t creating unwelcome transient distraction and the clarity for low note bends is undeniable.

In the neck this pickup is a notable change; neither flutey or flabby, and it’s actually an excellent clean sound to my ears. The loaner Modern sounds thinner and more jangly through a Fender Deluxe Reverb compared. There’s a mellow character from the Iommi that’s quite distinct with the mid focus, unlike the usual humbucker experience for me. Perhaps there's something in opting for a neck pickup that isn't designed for that role alone.

Verdict

With the price here on the premium side for a pair – and it should be noted the construction process of these pickups is probably unique for Gibson – only Iommi diehards will probably do the double. But even as a fan, and someone who has drifted from traditional ‘buckers towards the brighter clarity of Firebird and Wide Range options for my guitar mids, I was genuinely delighted with just how distinct and impressive Iommi’s signature humbucker is.

The real cherry on the cake was when I tuned down to drop D; even with guage 10 set of strings the sense of snarl and definition with the expected thickness was really satisfying as I rolled through some Sabbath, old Silverchair and Helmet riffs. A lot of fun! Then bringing in the bite rather than chime of the middle strings for some discordance with the low end is a real weapon to wield, while extended chords in higher gain levels don’t seem to suffer from a clash of frequencies because the highs are rolled back so judiciously.

The return of the Iommi Signature Humbucker is a welcome one. It's unlike any humbucker I've tried before, probably because the blueprint has evolved from a hum-cancelling take on a P-90 into the demands of higher gain levels as Iommi's rig has changed over the years. But the voicing is so well considered that cleans aren't overcooked with compression and those drive-drenched E string bends really do sound great. Should we have expected anything less from Iommi and Gibson?

MusicRadar rating: This humbucker is a must-try if you’re looking for an upgrade and play heavier music, or indeed just want to try something a bit different in the humbucker stable. Because just like Iommi was capable of exploring far more with Sabbath than juggernaut riffs, this is more than just a heavy metal pickup.

Hands-on videos

Sweetwater

You have to hand it to Roger Waters – he consistently finds new ways to annoy people.

Usually, those people are his ex-bandmates in Pink Floyd. Now it’s Jack Osbourne, who has – quite understandably – taken umbrage at some rather insensitive comments about his late father.

Waters was being interviewed on the Independent Ink podcast, when, in the midst of talking about capitalism, global politics and his usual bugbears, he suddenly veered onto the subject of the recently departed Black Sabbath frontman.

"Ozzy Osbourne, who just died, bless him in his whatever state that he was in his whole life. We'll never know. Although he was all over the TV for hundreds of years with his idiocy and nonsense. The music, I have no idea. I couldn't give a fuck."

Waters continued: "I don't care about Black Sabbath, I never did. Have no interest in biting the heads of chickens or whatever they do. I couldn't care less, you know."

Jack Osbourne has since responded on Twitter/X and, well... he doesn’t exactly mince his words.

"Hey Roger Waters, f*** you,” he began. “How pathetic and out of touch you've become. The only way you seem to get attention these days is by vomiting out bullshit in the press. My father always thought you were a c**t. Thanks for proving him right."

Oh dear.

For his part, Ozzy was always quite complimentary about Floyd. Speaking to Classic Rock about his favourite bands in 2022, Osbourne said: “The Floyd made good albums; I don’t think they ever made a bad one”.

As we know, Waters rarely has a good word to say about anyone or anything and his aversion to Black Sabbath and their music goes way back.

Reviewing their single Evil Woman for Melody Maker in 1970, he said: “Well, well, well… I’m speechless – well, almost. You keep thinking it’s going to start. You think that for the first minute, but then, if you are really perceptive, you realise it isn’t going to start, and that’s all there is.”

Bear in mind that in 1970 Waters and Floyd were established names in UK counter-culture and Sabbath merely an up-and-coming band. The review clearly stung. Indeed Tony Iommi remembered it when interviewed in 2017: “I used to read the slaggings we’d get and I’d just think ‘Why?’. There was one moment that really hurt, and that didn’t actually come from the press.

"It came from Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters. He gave it (Evil Woman) such a terrible review. I thought, ‘Blimey!’ Hearing that from a fellow musician seemed really harsh.”

Gibson has unveiled a new signature electric guitar pickup for the Godfather of Heavy Metal, Tony Iommi – or rather it has unveiled an old one, reissuing the Black Sabbath icon’s much loved signature humbucker after a number of years out of production.

Developed in the late ‘90s by JT Riboloff, Gibson’s then head of R&D Department, it was a piece of history – Gibson’s first ever signature pickup, and featured in Iommi’s signature guitars with Gibson.

Is this the ultimate aftermarket mod for anyone looking to give their electric guitar (preferably, an SG) a power-up for premier cru riff-work. Paraphrasing Tony Iommi here but it’s one to file under “You know it makes sense”.

“I’m really excited that Gibson’s bringing back my signature humbucker, they were getting pretty hard to find!” says Iommi. “This pickup came about after a lot of time spent in Nashville, just experimenting with different setups to get that perfect tone and sustain from my favourite guitars.”

He’s not exaggerating. At the launch event at the Gibson Garage London, Iommi said Riboloff had them locked in at the Nashville factory for the night. All the other staff had gone home. “Couldn’t we go and get something to eat, just to get out of here?” wondered Iommi. No, sorry. Riboloff was cooking.

But what he was cooking up was something special, a bespoke wind, inspired by Iommi's John Birch custom pickups, but reaching for something better – or at least incremental improvement, the leitmotif of Iommi's career – featuring Alnico 2 and Ceramic magnets, voiced for sustain and clarity in high-volume, high-gain scenarios. Like everything in Iommi’s rig, it was tailored to his specifications.

“We had to make sure it worked with my light gauge strings and low tunings, but still pack a punch, and the result has got some serious output,” says Iommi. “They’re on my signature guitars too, and I couldn’t be more pleased with how they turned out.”

Gibson CEO and president Cesar Gueikian is a fan of them. He has had them on his guitars for 15 years and counting.

“I was blown away with the distinct Tony Iommi and Black Sabbath sound I was able to get out of them,” he says. “They have such a great, clean look with the unique pickup cover, and we are excited to bring the Rifflord’s signature humbucker back as we continue to pay tribute to Tony.”

And Gibson is paying tribute to Iommi throughout August, with a documentary series featuring the likes of Scott Ian, Zakk Wylde, Steve Vai and Iommi’s good friend Brian May to debut on its GibsonTV YouTube channel.

“It’s great to have the first signature pickup from Gibson back, and there really isn’t a more fitting artist than Tony Iommi,” says Lee Bartram, head of commercial and marketing EMEA, Gibson. “Tony is synonymous with the Gibson SG, but now the volume, presence, and overall power he produces through his playing can be experienced in other models too, whether at home, in the studio, or on stage.

“Thanks to Tony for his continued support and trust; these pickups are the result of our constant collaboration, and we look forward to what’s next for our partnership.”

As for the specs, they are wax-potted. Back in the day, Iommi used to horrify Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward as he would wax-pot the pickups himself.

On one occasion, they were staying in a caravan in Cumbria, Iommi experimenting with wax-potting to try and reduce the noise from his Gibson SG, Laney tube amp, and Dallas Rangemaster setup. The smell was overpowering.

Well, here, Gibson has done all that work for you. Average DCR readings for these are 16k. They come in chrome housings as standard, with four-conductor wiring.

Available now, priced £199/$229, the Tony Iommi Signature Humbucker is available now. See Gibson for more details.

Glenn Hughes didn’t plan on joining Black Sabbath. It just sort of happened. And it turned into one of the biggest mistakes of his career.

In 1985, Hughes was approached by an old friend – Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi.

Iommi was working on a solo album, and told Hughes of his plan to feature an ensemble cast of famous vocalists across the album.

Among the big names lined up were Judas Priest’s Rob Halford and former Sabbath star Ronnie James Dio.

But in the end, Hughes was the only singer featured on the album that Iommi named Seventh Star.

In addition, what started out as a solo project eventually turned into a Black Sabbath album – albeit with the words ‘featuring Tony Iommi’ after the band’s name.

And for Hughes this strange episode ended abruptly and in disastrous fashion.

As Hughes now tells MusicRadar: “I love Tony dearly, and working with him was interesting. But it was a difficult time for all of us.”

He adds, alluding to his drug addiction during that time: “I look back on it now, and I’m not the man today that I was back in the mid-’80s.”

It was in the early ’70s that Hughes befriended Iommi.

Hughes was from Cannock in the Midlands, less than 30 miles from Black Sabbath’s hometown of Birmingham.

“I’d known Tony from the very beginning,” he says. “Since [Sabbath’s 1970 album] Paranoid. He was like family to me, and we grew up together in the UK.”

Hughes first made a name for himself as bassist and lead vocalist of power trio Trapeze.

He then joined Deep Purple, with whom he recorded three albums – Burn, Stormbringer and Come Taste The Band.

But his career path was erratic due to his problems with drugs.

In 1977 he made a soul-influenced solo album, Play Me Out, and in 1982 he starred on a cult classic hard rock record with guitarist Pat Thrall under the banner Hughes/Thrall.

Hughes says now that when Iommi reached out to him in 1985 there was never a discussion about him joining Black Sabbath.

He recalls: “After Purple finished, I was kind of done making that sort of grandiose rock music. And I say this with respect and reverence – I was never a Black Sabbath-type singer.

“I’m not a metal artist at all. And when you listen to the songs on Seventh Star, they aren’t Sabbath, you know?”

He says of Iommi’s offer: “Tony called me in 1985 to see if I was available to sing on a couple of songs – on a solo album with him. He told me that Ronnie James Dio and Rob Halford were gonna sing on a couple of songs each, and I was gonna sing on a couple of songs.

“So I went down to Cherokee Studios in Hollywood, and the first song we recorded was No Stranger To Love.

"Tony and I wrote the song that night, and we recorded it that night. Then Tony said, ‘Whoah, that was great! Can you come back tomorrow?’ And so I came back the next night, and we did In For The Kill.

“From that moment on, I think Tony realised: ‘Glenn is writing a song with me every day. I think we can just continue.’ So, he asked me if I’d like to be the only singer on the album, and I said, ‘Of course! No problem.’”

Seventh Star became a Black Sabbath album after Iommi was leaned on by the band’s record label Warner Brothers and manager Don Arden, father of Sharon Osbourne.

Hughes recalls: “Don Arden said, ‘Well, Warner Brothers thinks we should, for more ticket sales, call it ‘Sabbath featuring Tony’. Tony was not happy about that. And I, of course, had no say in the matter. So we had to go with what Warner Brothers and Don Arden wanted, really.”

Seventh Star was released in January 1986 and sold poorly.

Hughes admits: “Honestly, I haven’t heard the album in decades, but people talk about it. Some of the riffs are quite heavy, but lyrically and melodically, I’m not a metal singer. It really wasn’t my cup of tea, as they say.”

Alongside Iommi and Hughes, the album featured bassist Dave ‘The Beast’ Spitz, keyboard player Geoff Nicholls and future Kiss drummer Eric Singer. This line-up began a US tour but after just a few dates Hughes was fired and replaced by American vocalist Ray Gillen.

“That was difficult,” Hughes says now. “I had a problem, and got into a fight with the production manager the day before the tour started.

“He hit me right in the face, and broke a bone in my nose, and consequently I had dried blood caked around my vocal cords, so I couldn’t sing after three shows. It was impossible.

“Now, looking back, that’s kind of a horrifying thing for anyone to do. Regardless of if he hit me, or who said this, or who did what, it was a difficult moment for anybody to be hit in the face, and then asked to sing a song. So, it was a very tragic moment for me and Tony. But I can’t change the way things were."

It was one of the lowest points in his career, but Hughes says has no regrets about it now.

“All those things that happened to me in the mid ‘80s, they made me the man I am today,” he says. “I’m still here doing what I do. And with reverence and respect, I love Tony very much – and I love Black Sabbath. I have deep respect and love for all of that.”

The BBC documentary Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home, which should have gone out on air this evening (18 August) has been postponed to a later date. No reason has been given as yet.

In its place is an episode of Fake Or Fortune. The BBC has merely said that the film has “moved in the schedules” and that details will be shared “in due course”

All very mysterious. It may be that there has had to be some re-editing in the aftermath of Ozzy’s passing three weeks ago. Maybe the directors are having to insert some new interviews. Who knows?

Prior to this, the BBC had dropped a few titits about what to expect when it finally does go out.

The Black Sabbath singer will be shown "heroically" battling to get fit enough to perform on stage again, as the family deal with the consequences of his ill-health, the BBC had said.

There will be "love, laughter and tears", as his family come to terms with Ozzy’s condition and it’s Kelly Osbourne, who encapsulates the situation when she remarks that it shows that "Iron Man wasn't really made of iron."

Coming Home was filmed over the course of the last three years. Originally it was set to be a series titled Home To Roost, but over time has evolved into one-off doc, with the perfect denouement of the Back To The Beginning show.

Clare Sillery, the BBC head of documentary commissioning, said the team was "honoured" to film the Osbournes during this period of their lives.

She said the film showed the singer’s "enduring spirit... We hope it brings comfort and joy to Ozzy's fans and viewers as they remember and celebrate his extraordinary life.”

Ben Wicks and Colin Barr, the project’s executive producers said they thought it was an "inspiring and poignant" account of Ozzy fulfilling his dream to perform in front of his fans one last time.

They added: "Ozzy was loved by millions around the world not just for his music, but for his sense of mischief and his honesty, all of which we saw plenty of in the final years of his life. But one thing shone through even more brightly to us and that was Ozzy's intense love for his exceptional family who were by his side through it all."

Lars Ulrich has been giving his thoughts about the passing of Ozzy Osbourne and the icon’s last gig at the Back To The Beginning show.

The Metallica drummer appeared on Howard Stern’s Sirius XM show this week and was asked how Ozzy seemed in the run-up to the gig. "He was very eloquent and very sharp in his answer,” Ulrich explained.

“We were just sitting doing small talk, but it was so warm and he was very present, coherent. It was just his body that was not in good shape, but his mind … he was eloquent and talking and in the moment."

Ulrich, was one of the few who had seen Black Sabbath soundcheck and knew then that the reunited band would do a great job. "All the rest of us were just losing our f***ing minds and then they started playing War Pigs with the lights on and the show and air raid sirens and then we were obviously, as fans - and I don’t think I’m speaking out of turn here or being disrespectful - as fans I think there was a sense from all the other musicians and friends of Black Sabbath who were there.

"We were hoping for the best. We wanted it to be the best. We wanted it to be a grand slam, but we didn’t know, because ultimately none of us knew what kind of shape they were in ...

"Then Ozzy came in singing and sounded great, hit all the notes and the lyrics and the timings and everybody was like: 'This is gonna be fine, they’re gonna f***ing kill it'."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0BTBQj5foVM

Meanwhile Sharon Osbourne has said that Ozzy was deeply moved by the outpouring of love at the Back To The Beginning gig. In fact, just days before he died, he apparently admitted as much to her.

“He turned around and he said to me that night, ‘I had no idea that so many people liked me’. Ozzy’s always been in his own bubble.”

Sharon was speaking to the online platform Pollstar and said of the Villa Park gig: “It was a huge success, because it was a phenomenal event. It was the first time, I think, that anybody’s gone into retirement and done it, where the show is streamed and it goes to charity. So it’s the first time anybody has said goodnight like that, it’s the perfect way, when you’ve had such a long career, to end it.”

She also revealed that she has been working on a BBC documentary about the gig and Ozzy’s final chapter. Entitled Ozzy Osbourne: Coming Home, it was filmed over the last three years of his life and will be screened on BBC1 on August 18.

Zakk Wylde, Ozzy Osbourne’s guitarist and close friend for decades, has spoken for the first time since the Sabbath frontman’s sudden passing last week.

In a new interview with Guitar World, Wylde, who first played with Ozzy on his 1988 album No Rest For The Wicked and stayed with him on and off right until the very end, at Villa Park earlier this month, revealed that, like so many people, that night was the last time he saw him.

“Everybody and their mother were in the backstage dressing room and I just wanted to give him a break,” he told the magazine. “I figured we’d see him later on – the next day or whatever. But no. The last text I got from Oz was saying, ‘Zakky, sorry, it was like a madhouse back there. I didn’t see you.’ He goes, ‘Thanks for everything.’ It was just us talking, saying, ‘I love you, buddy.’ That was it.”

“Oz was just the best,” the guitarist said, reflecting on their relationship. “I have my father, who was a World War II veteran; and then Ozzy, who was almost like an older brother. There was almost a 20-year age gap between us. With our relationship, there was the fun drinking – but if I ever needed advice, I could talk to him.”

“There were issues on how to drink and how not to drink; you know, the important factors in life!”

Asked why he thought Ozzy chose him as a guitarist, Wylde suggested that personal chemistry was the most important factor: “Forget the guitar playing; the way I made ham sandwiches was amazing… my ham sandwiches with Coleman’s are on par with Randy (Rhoads) and Jake’s (Lee’s) greatness on guitar!”

“But with anything, if it works, and it’s easy, that’s how it should be with bands. And relationships in general. Your wife, your friends, anyone – if they don’t bring you peace, why are you with these people? Who needs to be sticking their hand in a boiling pot of water?”

Like most of his friends, whilst Wylde knew Ozzy was ill he had no idea he would leave us so soon. But he reflects: “I’m blessed and grateful, man. Anything other than that would be selfish.”

“And on top of it, to go out with what’s the biggest-grossing charity event of all? That’s unbelievable. He helped a whole lot of people instead of making a profit. My God, what an incredible master. What an incredible life.”

There have been many, many tributes from the great and good to Ozzy Osbourne in the 48 hours since the metal icon’s death was announced on Tuesday. Now drummer Zak Starkey has offered his own, and it includes a somewhat eye-opening disclosure.

The (probably) ex Who and Oasis drummer has revealed that he was once approached by Sharon Osbourne to join Black Sabbath. This was at a time when Bill Ward was not part of the line-up and, needing a drummer to play Lollapalooza, they emailed Starkey, who yesterday screen-shotted the 2013 message.

It reads: “Zak, Black Sabbath is headlining Download on June 10 and then Lollapalooza in August. The guys need a drummer for their album, which will be recorded in September with Rick Rubin producing. We would probably need you for 2-3 weeks for the album. Also, they need a drummer to play at Lollapalooza which is on August 3 in Chicago.”

Osbourne then added, jokingly: “Also, Ozzy wants to have sex with you while he is singing ‘Iron Man’. Big Kiss, Sharon”.

Starkey would turn down the offer – he had prior commitments at the time with The Who and the role went instead to ex-Rage Against The Machine and Audioslave sticksman Brad Wilk, who played on the band’s final studio album, 13. But Starkey claims to have rued that decision, captioning the email: “Regrets I’ve had a few – this is one – (not the sex part!)”

“Ozzy will always be one of the greatest, natural, brilliant singers of all time,” he wrote. “I send much love and strength to his family at this sad sad time. If u aren’t familiar with the Never Say Die record – get into it – it’s so far out.”

Meanwhile, it’s been confirmed that a concert film of the Back To The Beginning gig will hit cinemas next year. It’s already in production and, according to makers Mercury Studios, will be “a love letter to Ozzy and the pioneering sound of Black Sabbath.” More details will doubtless be revealed nearer the time.

Ozzy Osbourne knew how to pick a guitar player. It was one of his many gifts. He had the uncanny knack of sniffing out talent. Whenever his career was in need of uplift, shocked back to life with electric guitar, he somehow found the right man for the job.

It would be no exaggeration to say that Randy Rhoads saved him. In 1979, Ozzy was on the skids, out of Black Sabbath, out of luck. Enter this diminutive, book-smart maverick from Santa Monica. Everything changed.

Ozzy launched his solo career with the hottest player in hard rock and metal since Eddie Van Halen. Rhoads’ death in 1982, aged 25, in a plane crash in Florida, was devastating.

Those who stepped up in the aftermath, such as Bernie Tormé, who had just left Gillan, then Brad Gillis of Night Ranger, did their bit. Theirs may have been a cameo turn in the Ozzy Osbourne story but they kept the wheels moving, and before Gillis’ time with the Prince of Darkness was over, he at least got to record the live album Speak Of The Devil.

When it came to replace Rhoads on a studio album, Jake E Lee stepped up. He was reportedly a toss-up between Lee and George Lynch of Dokken, with Ozzy preferring the latter.

That makes an interesting alternate history; Lynch would have been ideal for the Ozzy gig. But Lee proved he had the stuff. His work on Bark Of The Moon was total box-office ‘80s metal, a Friday night thrill fest. Ron Nevison’s production on its follow-up, The Ultimate Sin, might have disappointed Ozzy but Lee’s playing was unimpeachable.

It didn’t save him. Ozzy’s wife and manager, Sharon, fired Lee. And by 1987, auditions were open again, and this time Ozzy would find his longest-serving six-string lieutenant, Zakk Wylde.

Hiring Wylde, then just a coltish 19-year-old, set the wheels in motion for Ozzy’s hitherto most successful solo album, No More Tears, and a collaboration that lasted until Black Sabbath and Ozzy’s final bow at Villa Park, Birmingham, for the Back To The Beginning all-dayer.

Wylde made his debut on 1988’s No Rest For The Wicked. Speaking to MusicRadar in 2021 for No More Tears' 30th anniversary, Wylde recalled how he drew upon Randy Rhoads’ influence for how he approached his solos.

“It was a very composed solo, like a lot of my Ozzy stuff. That’s what came out of the Randy Rhoads school of soloing, where everything had a beginning, a middle and an end,” said Wylde. “The solos were composed to be part of the song, as opposed to just improv and shredding over the whole thing. It’s the chord progressions that accommodate the solos… and I still do that today. I’ll sit there with my practice amp listening to a homework CD or playlist of backing tracks, coming out with different ideas until I find something I’m happy with.”

Wylde scarcely had time to think. But for its follow-up, he had settled upon a style. He was going to forego the neoclassical stuff that was all very much of the day. Play arpeggios and you would sound like Yngwie, he reasoned. Similarly, two-handed tapping, natural harmonics, all that stuff could see you written off as just another EVH clone – and there were many.

“At the time, three note per-string diatonic scales were super popular and everybody was playing in the vein,” said Wylde. “I was looking at the list and figured the only thing left would be pentatonic scales. So it was like taking all the crayons out of the box, leaving myself just four to play with and seeing what I could draw with that. It forces you to come up with something, when you are working with less.”

It worked. Wylde’s hydrocarbon tone – fuelled by the one/two punch of his Les Paul’s active EMG81/85 humbucker pairing, a JCM800 with a Boss SD-1 overdrive pedal in front – was just the thing to set those pentatonics alight. And he hit those strings hard. Wylde was off to the races.

But one of the break-out hits from No More Tears was not the product of careful consideration. Far from it. When I Don’t Want To Change The World came together, Wylde says it was all a big joke.

Ozzy was not in the building. The band were making their own entertainment.

“I remember when the man riff came about. We were at Joe’s Garage in Burbank, just rehearsing and writing material for the record,” recalled Wylde. “Ozzy hadn’t gotten there yet. I remember jamming that riff as a joke because we’d fill in the pauses, just talking into the mic.”

What follows is a reminder to all that you should keep a tape running in the rehearsal room. You never know what might happen, a riff that could make the cut. But back then, Wylde was just goofing off, vamping on the mic.

‘The whole premise was how we could never get a date, so I’d sing something like, ‘Hi, my name’s Zakk and I don’t have a job and live with my parents!’ before going back into the riff,” he explained. “The joke was you don’t have a home, a car or a job and you probably won’t be getting laid anytime soon. We were doing that riff and cracking up laughing the whole time.”

The laughing stopped when the boss opened the door. Ozzy heard something in it. The rest is history.

“Ozzy walked in and said, ‘What’s that riff?’ and I said, ‘Ozzy, we’re just goofing around!’ So he told us to remember it and we’ll use it for something,” said Wylde. “Later we ended up winning a Grammy with that song.”

It’s true. I Don’t Want To Change The World came out of a joke riff and a goof-off and really did take home the Grammy for Best Metal Performance – only not the recording we hear on No More Tears. It was the Live & Loud version, recorded at a 1992 Orlando, Florida Ozzy show, that took home the award. You never know where your joke riffs might take you.

Tony Iommi has spoken for the first time since news of Ozzy Osbourne’s death broke on Tuesday. In a lengthy interview with ITV, the guitarist talked, movingly, about his shock at his bandmate’s seemingly sudden passing and about what happened immediately after the Back To The Beginning gig on 5 July.

"It was a shock for us," Iommi told the broadcaster. "I mean, when I heard yesterday, it couldn’t sink in. I thought, ‘It can’t be.’ I only had a text from him the day before. It just seemed unreal, surreal. And it really didn’t sink in. And in the night, I started thinking about it: ‘God, am I dreaming all this?’ But as I said before, he’s not looked well through the rehearsals.

"I think he really just held out to do that show. I really feel – and me and Geezer were talking about it last night – that we think he held out to do it, and just after that, he’s done it and said goodbye to the fans. And that was the end of it, really.”

The show – which saw Ozzy perform five songs with his own band and then four with Sabbath – will never be forgotten. Certainly, it’s unlikely such an incredible bill of rock and metal artists will be assembled in the same place ever again. According to Iommi, the band themselves were quietly pleased after their performance.

"Well, he went to his dressing room and I went to mine and Geez went to his and so on," says Iommi. "And then he came over. He came around before he was leaving on a wheelchair that brought him in to say goodbye and have a little chat for a bit. And he seemed all right. He enjoyed it. And he said, ‘Oh, it went all right, didn’t it?’ I said, ‘Yeah, it did.’

"But as I say, when I had the text off him the day before yesterday saying he’s tired and he’s really got no energy. And I thought, ‘Oh, dear.’ ‘Cause it’s a lot for him to do that under the problems he’s got.

"And we could see it in rehearsal. We didn’t want him there every day at rehearsal, because it’s too much. He just wouldn’t be able to stand it. So they’d bring him in and he’d sit down and sing a few songs, and then we’d talk about some rubbish old times or whatever, have a laugh, and then he’d go. And that’s sort of what we did, really.”

Knowing that the band managed to do that gig before his passing has been some compensation, Iommi said. “I’m really glad we did it. It was a final thing for everybody. If we hadn’t have done it, people couldn’t have seen the band and Ozzy and it would have been a shame.”

Black Sabbath packed a lot into the 1970s. They began the decade by inventing heavy metal and ended it by sacking legendary frontman Ozzy Osbourne.

In between were all sorts of highs and lows - which guitarist Tony Iommi discussed in a 2011 interview with Classic Rock.

Iommi began by talking about how the band’s self-titled debut album was slaughtered by music critics upon its release in February 1970.

“It wasn’t nice to read the reviews,” he said. “It’s your first album ever, and you get all the music magazines to see what’s been said about it, and then all you read is: ‘What a load of crap!’ I just went, Oh my God…

“It was hurtful at first, but you learn to live with it after a while. And the most important thing is - we believed in what we did. And that was the way life went for us, right from the beginning. We had to get over a lot of fences.

“I didn’t mind if a reviewer said, ‘It’s not my cup of tea, but a lot of kids do like it.’ But they said that nobody liked us. That was a little upsetting. But we just forged ahead. It’s the only way you can do it.

“You’ve got to believe in what you do. You can’t just fall apart because of what other people say.”

Iommi recalled how Sabbath’s first European tour shaped the sound of their second album Paranoid - and especially its classic opening track War Pigs.

“We ended up playing in this one place in Zurich for what seemed like an eternity,” he said. “In reality it was just a few weeks.

“The first night we arrived there, the place was packed, and it was fantastic. A band was playing, it was their last night and they had champagne. We thought, ‘This is great!’ Little did we know that they couldn’t wait to get out of there.

“When we played the next night the place was as dead as a doornail. We were playing to hardly anybody. Our audience was a couple of hookers and some lunatic who used to do handstands in front of the stage and all his money would fall out of his pockets.

“But we carried on, and we played for ourselves, and it gave us the opportunity to jam and write, because we had so long to play. Every night we had to play seven 45-minute spots. We hadn’t got enough songs, so we used to make up stuff. Which was great, really. That’s where War Pigs came from and some of the other tracks – from jamming.”

As Sabbath got more and more successful, and toured heavily in America, Iommi encountered unexpected challenges with his gear.

He admitted: “We had some problems playing in those big arenas. The Spectrum in Philadelphia, being an ice rink, they had this big machinery in the back – generators to keep the ice from melting. And this machinery always used to effect my equipment.

“My whole guitar sound just turned into this horrendous racket. I had this treble booster that I plugged into my amp, and you name it, it picked everything up – you’d hear a bloody cab radio and all sorts. So those gigs for me were a bloody nightmare.”

The band’s 1973 album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath is one of their very best, but Iommi remembered then making of that album as a struggle.

“We started trying to write and I just hit a wall,” he said. “I couldn’t think of anything. I couldn’t believe it. I’d never had writer’s block before. And the more worried I got, the worse it got.

“In the end we decided to go somewhere that was out of the way, so we went to Clearwell Castle [in Gloucestershire]. I thought, ‘We’ll get a bit of atmosphere there.’

“There were dungeons in the basement and that’s where we set up the gear. And as soon as we got down there, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath was the first track I came up with, the first riff.

“The whole vibe in those dungeons made me come up with that riff. And once we’d got the starter song, we could just carry on. That was great for us. It was really good, quite exciting.”

Sabbath’s 1976 album Technical Ecstasy had a more experimental sound, which, as Iommi recalled, was mostly his own work.

“We had a keyboard player then, Gerald Woodroffe. And we’d gone to Ridge Farm [in Surrey] to write the album and rehearse.

"It was good for me, because I could rehearse with Gerald. The other lads used to stay in bed quite late, so you didn’t want to make too much noise. But I’d sit down with Gerald and we’d write all this stuff. So that album was different from the others, but I did like it.

“We went to Miami to record Technical Ecstasy at Criteria Studios. Maybe that wasn’t such a good idea.

“We all stayed in a place right on the beach, and I’d go down to the studio and nobody would be there!

“The Bee Gees were recording there too. I spent a lot of time hanging out with Barry Gibb. And the Eagles were there, too, in the room next to us. The Eagles had to pack up and go because we were too loud!”

The 1978 album Never Say Die! was the last they made before singer Ozzy Osbourne was fired in controversial circumstances.

Iommi described the recording of that album as a miserable time.

“I don’t know how we got that album done,” he said. “I booked the studio out in Toronto, never having seen it in my life. I booked it because the Stones had used it. But when we got there, it was just too plush, it wasn’t right for us. I had all the carpet ripped up because it just sounded dead in there.

“We had to rehearse in the morning at this cinema, and it was fucking freezing cold. And then at night we’d go into the studio to record. So it was very hard to put that album together, very frustrating for us all.”

It was while promoting Never Say Die! that Sabbath toured with Van Halen as the opening act. This proved a chastening experience as Sabbath were routinely blown off stage by the young and hungry Van Halen.

Iommi confessed: “We were burnt out and had come to a stage in our lives when the band was not right.

“When we did that tour, Van Halen were really hot to trot, whereas we were established, but burning out.

“We were good friends with Van Halen. We had them on tour with us for eight months, and Eddie Van Halen became one of my best friends.

“Eddie was the first guitarist I’d heard come up with the tapping method. And he was a great player. But that tour was difficult.

“Van Halen were really good. They were great musicians, energetic onstage. But we hit a wall.

“We didn’t know where we were going - and Van Halen were really going somewhere. They were jumping all over the stage, and we were like old farts in comparison.

“They used to be side of stage every night watching us. You could see that they wanted to learn. And they did. They worked hard and really did good. We’d gone as far as we could at that point.”

Black Sabbath would begin the next decade with a new singer - Ronnie James Dio.

But that of course is a whole other story…

Judas Priest will not be playing on Saturday afternoon when the world’s biggest metal bands descend upon Villa Park in Birmingham, England, to perform at Black Sabbath’s last ever show, Back To The Beginning, but the Metal Gods have released their own tribute with a cover of War Pigs.

War Pigs is to Priest what UFO’s Doctor Doctor is to Iron Maiden; it’s the intro tape that always plays before Rob Halford and co take to the stage. But they had never covered it until now.

“We are honoured to show our love for Ozzy and Black Sabbath with our homage to War Pigs,” reads Judas Priest’s statement. “A song we play at every show around the world that fans sing along to – reinforcing their love as well for the legendary Prince of Darkness!”

Where does this rank in Priest's catalogue of covers? It's too early to tell but it's not up there with Diamonds And Rust, and it's no Johnny B. Goode, thankfully.

Priest throw everything at it. All guns blazing. They might have lost KK Downing in acrimonious circumstances (now he is one original Priest member who is playing Back To The Beginning under the renegade banner of KK’s Priest) but we have the Glenn Tipton, Andy Sneap and Richie Faulkner present and correct. Tipton is on his theatrically shaped Hamer Custom GT with the block inlays.

The whiplash editing makes it hard to tell whether Sneap is on a Jackson Rhoads or King V but we’d say the former – it’s usually a Rhoads he plays. And the reason we’re detailing the guitars is because Faulkner is playing what looks like it could be a prototype signature guitar – a Les Paul Custom finished in Pelham Blue with a white double-guard.

It’s the Faulknerisation of the original triple-humbucker Les Paul Custom, more commonly found in Ebony or white, and it’s pretty damn cool. Those three humbuckers are his signature EMG electric guitar pickups.

One thing that suggests it might not be a signature model is the fingerboard, where it is your typical LP Custom configuration, block inlays on ebony – Faulkner’s now out-of-production Custom Shop Flying V Custom had his logo at the 12th fret. Anyway, that could be worth keeping an eye on.

As will Back To The Beginning. Good luck getting a ticket. The event, which is being curated by Rage Against The Machine guitarist Tom Morello, will be livestreamed. See Back To The Beginning for more details. In other Black Sabbath news, the band’s early demos – when they were still known as Earth – are being reissued.

The release collects all the demo material that the band tracked at Birmingham’s Zella Studios in 1969. You can pre-order Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes via Big Bear Records, shipping July 25.

• Laney celebrates Black Sabbath's final show with limited edition Black Country Customs reissue of Tony Iommi's TI100 signature amp

The final Black Sabbath performance this coming Saturday is being billed as ‘Back To The Beginning’, so it’s appropriate that this week it’s been announced that an album of the band’s early recordings is to released, from back when they were still called Earth.

Earth: The Legendary Lost Tapes compiles the demos that the band made in 1969 at Zella Studios in Birmingham. This was the period when Tony Iommi had just rejoined the band after a short stint in Jethro Tull, but before they officially changed their name to Black Sabbath in August 1969.

The compilation has been put together by the band’s first manager, Jim Simpson, who has put out a statement saying: “Before Black Sabbath, the band were known as Earth – a blues-driven powerhouse already making a name for themselves. This new release presents rare early recordings from that era, remastered from long-lost tapes.”

“These recordings clearly demonstrate what fine music they produced right from the very beginning. We recorded these tracks at Zella Studio in Birmingham in 1969, but held back from releasing them as their style was evolving so quickly.”

“Now, some 57 years later, the recordings assume a greater importance, illustrating how these four young men from Birmingham, barely out of their teens, were excellent musicians and a fine band, fully deserving of all the success that was to come their way.”

Here’s a taster of the album:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e7gCMv10raE

It should be said that none of the four original members have had anything to do with the release, which comes out on July 25 on Big Bear Records. Do not expect to hear any of its contents at Saturday’s gig.

Talking of which, last minute preparations for the all-dayer have been going on – last week the band posted pictures from their first rehearsal, including three of the four members sat on a sofa grinning and waving at the camera.

Meanwhile, last month it was confirmed, for the many thousands who don’t have tickets, that the event will be livestreamed from 3pm on Saturday. For more details go to the Back To The Beginning website here.

With Black Sabbath about to play their last ever show at Villa Park this weekend, Laney Amplification has unveiled a super limited edition replica of Tony Iommi’s signature tube amp head to mark the occasion.

The Black Country Customs TI100 is handmade in the UK, and is an exacting replica of Iommi’s 2012 signature head, complete with the grille plate with crosses backlit in red. Each amp comes with a signed and numbered backplate, plus a certificate of authenticity, limited edition guitar picks and commemorative postcards – and everything you need to nail his electric guitar tone.

A dual-channel amplifier, the TI100 is made for metal guitar, with its Lead channel voiced for down tunings, and does not want for high-gain saturation. But it does a lot more.

The Rhythm channel handles all your cleans, right through to blues guitar crunch. And with an onboard boost section, one per channel, it gives you a footswitchable hotter voice for each channel.

The engineers at Laney’s Black Country Customs workshop configured the boost so that it works just as would in the pedal. When activated, adjust the bright red Boost dials accordingly and they will hit the front end of the guitar amp with some extra decibels.

As Laney's product manager, Simon Fraser Clark explains, when he was co-designing the original TI100 with Iommi, he wanted something different.

“Tony is very much one of these people who hasn’t rested on his laurels,” says Clark. “In 2012, Tony came to us to start talking about his new signature amp, the TI100, and that was used on the 2013 tour, for the album 13, and it was a departure in his sound from pervious tours – he wanted something that was a bit more heavier, had a bit more compression to it, a bit more gain. So that led to the TI100.”

Each channel has its own three-band EQ and controls for Enhance and Presence. The latter is something most players will be familiar with; it allows you to adjust the high-end response of the output section, a little post EQ spritz and polish – it can sometimes give your electric guitar tone the extra sparkle it needs to make harmonics and feedback pop out.

Enhance does something similar for the low end frequencies. Again, it sits in the output stage, and shapes the response. Fully counterclockwise, that response is tight, the kind of tone you might use for contemporary metal styles, full-bore chug and all that animalistic business.

Turn the dial clockwise and it opens up a bit, letting those chords bloom – fine-tuning for doom. It is nice to see independent Enhance and Presence controls for each channel; it is more common to find them as global controls serving both.

Under the hood there is a quartet of 6L6 power tubes, with 8 2AX7 preamp tubes. Altogether you get 100-watts to play with. Laney are only making 50 of these. They come with a protective covering, and all the case candy and extras mentioned above.

But this is an amp that was designed to play. It’s built for the road. Those integrated grab handles are a super practical feature when lugging a 21.5kg amplifier up a flight of stairs.

Other nods to pragmatism include an “ultra transparent” effects loop that can accommodate your pedalboard – and/or rack equipment. The loop has an FX Return Gain dial so you can compensate for any change in gain when effects are applied, and you can bypass the loop altogether.

The TI100 ships with an FS4-TI footswitch for changing channels and turning each channel’s boost on and off. Again, this is replete with signature details, with Iommi’s signature and cross logo on the enclosure.

Around the back of the amp there are all the 1/4” speaker outputs you’d need – 4 Ohms, 8 Ohms, 2x 8 Ohms, 16 Ohms, 2 x 16 Ohms… It’s a serious piece of kit, and they’re only making 50 of ‘em. And Sabbath have only one show left, Back To The Beginning, Villa Park, Saturday July 5.

As Laney says, it was Laney in the beginning for Iommi, the LA100BL pressed into service as he inaugurated heavy metal with Black Sabbath’s eponymous anthem, and it has been Laney all the way since.

Priced £2999, the Black Country Customs Tony Iommi TI100 is available now. See Laney Amplification for more details.

All four members of the ‘classic’ line-up of Black Sabbath have been awarded the freedom of the City Of Birmingham.

The Lord Mayor of the City presented scrolls and medals to Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Geezer Butler in a private ceremony on Saturday. It’s an honour that no Brummie (and surely no metal fan) would quibble about.

And it comes a week before what is set to be an emotional evening at Villa Park, when the band will make their final appearance together at the Back To The Beginning concert.

Interviewed afterwards, Ozzy Osbourne reflected on how far he and the band have come since their early days: “I first put an advert in a music store in town. If these guys hadn’t come to my door, I wouldn’t be sitting here now.”

“It seems to have flown by so quickly. It’s amazing. I think about my dad, who went into debt to buy me a microphone. If only he could be here now. I think he would be very proud. I’m a Brummie and I always will be a Brummie. Birmingham forever!”

Meanwhile Geezer Butler added: “This is a great working class city, and we’re all working class, from Aston.”

“We weren’t given a chance when we started out, but Birmingham has always been behind us. People used to make fun of our accents, but we’re all proud Birmingham people and we love this city. It’s one of the greatest cities ever, it’s given the world so much and we’re proud to be here.”

The band also found time to visit a newly-created mural of the band that’s been painted on Navigation Street in the city and they met the artist, a fellow known only as ‘Mr Murals’ and gave him two free tickets to next week’s Villa Park show.

"Every single one of them took the time to speak to me and were so kind," Murals said. "It's mental. I'm still not over it."

It has to be one of the most bizarre promotions of all time. Liquid Death, the makers of iced tea, have launched a limited edition run of cans that includes Ozzy Osbourne’s own DNA.

Yes, you read that correctly. It’s an ultra limited release of just 10 cans of what the brand are calling ‘Infinite Ozzy’. Each of the cans were consumed by the Black Sabbath singer before being sealed to preserve his DNA. They all come in a lab-quality display container and is hand-signed by the man himself

The drop happened yesterday (June 17) at liquiddeath.com/ozzy so if you’re reading this it’s probably already too late. But then the collectors’ items were retailing for $450 each, making them among the most expensive soft drinks of all time.

Liquid Death have stated that the goal is to preserve Osbourne’s DNA should fans want to clone him in the future, once technology and law allow. Indeed, in a teaser video to accompany the promotion, Osbourne says: “My DNA is in this can. You could clone me — but why the f**k would you want to?”

Of course, it’s all cunningly timed to tie in with the Back To The Beginning Show, which is now just two and a half weeks away. On his Sirius XM show Ozzy Speaks, the singer said he was confident he’d be able to perform at the gig. “I haven’t done any physical work for the last seven, six and a half, seven years,” he said. “By hook or by crook, I’m gonna make it (to the stage at Villa Park).”

“I’ve got this trainer guy who helps people get back to normal,” he added. “It’s hard going, but he’s convinced that he can pull it off for me. I’m giving it everything I’ve got.”

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi admits that he is worried about the band's upcoming performance at singer Ozzy Osbourne’s farewell show in Birmingham on 5 July.

In a new interview with Music Week, Iommi says of the event at Villa Park: “This would be a big, monumental thing if it all comes good. The worrying thing for me is the unknown. We don’t know what’s going to happen.

“Normally, when we’d tour, we’d rehearse and run through the thing for a while, and it’s just us. But with this event there are so many other moving parts.”

This show, under the banner ‘Back To The Beginning’, will feature performances from a host of guest stars including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses and Tool.

Ozzy Osbourne is scheduled to perform a set of solo material before reuniting with Black Sabbath alongside Iommi and fellow founding members Geezer Butler and Bill Ward.

But with Osbourne in poor health, Iommi says that fans should not expect too much from the singer.

“You’re used to Ozzy running around,” Iommi says, “but he certainly won’t be doing that for this show. I don’t know if he’s going to be standing or sitting on a throne or what.”

Iommi says he is approaching this show with “excitement mixed with fear”.
He clarifies: “Once we start playing, then we’ll know we’re doing it. It’s always a worry, even when we did tours before, there’s always that build-up, and then it gets to the point that we do it and it’s OK.”

He also states that this show is definitely the final performance from Ozzy and from Black Sabbath.

“It’s absolutely the end,” he insists. “This show has come up because of the situation [with Osbourne’s illness] and because it’s a charity thing. But there’s no way we could go out and do a tour.

"Everybody in the band is looking forward to doing it, though it’s a nerve-wracking thing, as we’ll be touching on some stuff that we haven’t done for a long time.”

We’re just a month away now from Back To The Beginning, the final Black Sabbath performance and the woman who conceptualised the whole thing – Sharon Osbourne, of course – has given a fascinating interview to Music Business UK.

It touches all aspects of her managerial career, from learning what (and what not to do) from her father, Don Arden, to starting out managing Gary Moore before she guided Ozzy through to a successful solo career.

She also dishes out some sage wisdom gleaned from her five decades in the music business. “Never let your publishing go,” she says. “Until you get to the stage where you think you want to bail, and then you sell it all for a fortune.

"You look at where your songs could end up; you could get a couple of million each time your song is used in an advertisement.

“Other people could cover your song and have a hit with a song that wasn’t a hit for you. It’s something which, now, I know a lot of artists, they go in, and they want deals, (and the) record companies want their publishing. It’s like, ‘Fuck you, no way.’”

Osbourne also doesn’t think much of the long term development of artists in the modern music industry: “There is no development currently at record labels. They take everything. Record labels developing (artists) doesn’t exist. A&R departments just go on the internet. That’s it. They’ll take your publishing, your merchandise and everything else, and all they do is press and distribute and stream you.

“Most of the record companies own the streaming anyway and all of this about, ‘Oh, I’ve got a billion streams, it’s amazing.’ Well, you’re getting less than a fucking penny for a stream. It’s absolutely bastardising an artist’s music.”

She also revealed that the creation of Ozzfest – a huge festival success of the 1990s/2000s - was a direct result of her husband getting turned down by Lollapalooza.

“They were like, ‘No, not at all. Not for us.’ It gave me the idea of, ‘Fuck it (then) we’ll do our own metal festival’, because it didn’t exist. There were no touring metal festivals. It was the beginning; all the rest followed. And I’m so proud of that.

"We did it first, and it was an opportunity for so many younger bands to play in front of a huge crowd.”

There’s much more, of course. Click here to read the whole interview.

When Ozzy Osbourne was kicked out of Black Sabbath in 1979, fans were stunned. But as guitarist Tony Iommi insisted, the only other option the band had was to split up.

In an interview with Classic Rock, Iommi recalled how the problem with Osbourne came to a head in Los Angeles during sessions for Sabbath’s ninth album.

“We had some chats with Ozzy," Iommi said. "Whether he’d remember them or not, I don’t know.

“I was in a terrible position, because I was the one who used to go to meetings with the record company. I’d go over to Warner Brothers and they’d say: ‘How’s the album coming along?’ ‘Oh, alright.’ ‘When can we hear some tracks?’ ‘Um, soon…’

“I was lying. It just wasn’t happening. We were coming up with riffs, but Ozzy just wasn’t into it anymore.

“He’d done too much of everything. A lot of times when we were working, he’d be asleep on a couch.”

Osbourne would later claim that being sacked by Black Sabbath for drinking too much and doing too many drugs was akin to being “hung by a jury of murderers”.

Iommi maintained that the band’s bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward were in agreement that Osbourne had to go.

“It wasn’t just my decision to fire him,” the guitarist said. “It was a decision made by all three of us.

“It was Bill who told Ozzy. Ozzy probably thought I was behind it all, but it was a band decision. It was either we break up or we carry on without him.”

Iommi also admitted that he had contacted another singer, Ronnie James Dio, before the decision to fire Osbourne was made — and that the contact was made via Ozzy’s future wife and manager Sharon Arden.

“I got in touch with Ronnie through Sharon,” Iommi said. “I met Ronnie at a party.

“I really didn’t feel happy with the way things were going with Ozzy. I thought about doing something with Ronnie. And then when we split with Ozzy, I said to the others, ‘Well, why don’t we try Ronnie?’

“We’d heard the Rainbow albums with Ronnie singing. I thought we had to try to see what we could do with him.”

American singer Ronnie James Dio had made four albums with Rainbow, the band led by ex-Deep Purple guitarist Ritchie Blackmore.

The second of these albums, Rising, was released in 1976 and featured the classic track Stargazer.

In 1978, however, Ritchie Blackmore decided to pursue a more commercial hard rock direction with Rainbow — a move which resulted in Dio being replaced by British vocalist Graham Bonnet.

Dio was therefore available when Iommi made his approach.

Iommi knew that it was a gamble. But this was one gamble that really paid off.

“Ronnie had so much against him,” Iommi said. “It was so hard for him to walk into a band as established as we were, and he wasn’t a big chap, just a little guy.

“But I just looked at the size of the talent. He sang so well.

“As soon as we heard Ronnie sing with us, we knew he was the right man. It was different to what we’d done, but there wasn’t much else we could do.

“We started writing completely differently, because Ronnie was such a different kind of singer. If we had got another singer who sounded like Ozzy, I think that would have been worse. It had to be something different. The music we wrote with him was a different approach.

“It was like we were starting over again. But it made us fight again. We’d lost that fight — you get too comfortable. It made us have to work again, it kicked us up the arse, and that was good for the band.”

With Dio in place of Ozzy, a rejuvenated Black Sabbath created one of the greatest albums of their career — Heaven And Hell.

Released in March 1980, the album included a monumental title track and others destined to become classics — Neon Knights, Children Of The Sea and Die Young.

In September of that year, Ozzy Osbourne bounced back with his first post-Sabbath album, Blizzard Of Ozz, featuring a new guitar hero in Randy Rhoads.

Over time, Heaven And Hell would be acclaimed as a true Sabbath classic and arguably the crowning glory of Ronnie James Dio’s career.

Back in 1980, what this album represented for Tony Iommi was a new beginning and a complete validation.

“I had an excitement about the band again,” Iommi said. “I had to keep this band going. I’ve never been one to give up. I had to fight and to try and make it work.

“It would have been so easy to have turned my back on it and just said, ‘That’s it.’ But I couldn’t do that. I had to go with it and make it work. And it did.

“Heaven And Hell turned out to be great album. Black Sabbath hadn’t died. We were back out there with Ronnie and the band was great again.”

Here's a collaboration no one saw coming. Robbie Williams has recruited Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi to play on his new single, Rocket, the first track shared from the former Take That singer’s forthcoming album, Britpop.

The track features electric guitar from Iommi throughout, and is a sort of bland high-energy pop-rocker that is more P!nk than Paranoid, and comes and goes in under three minutes. Whatever you can say about Williams he is at least eager to get right down to it.

Britpop (stylised BRITPOP, all caps, you gotta shout to be heard these days) is scheduled for release in the Autumn, and you can expect more guest appearances.

“I set out to create the album that I wanted to write and release after I left Take That in 1995,” said Williams, on Instagram. “It was the peak of Britpop and a golden age for British Music. I’ve worked with some of my heroes on this album; it’s raw, there are more guitars and it’s an album that’s even more upbeat and anthemic than usual.

“There’s some ‘Brit’ in there and there’s certainly some ‘pop’ too – I’m immensely proud of this as a body of work and I’m excited for fans to hear this album.”

There are no details as to who produced Rocket, or as to how a boyband idol ended up working with the Godfather of Heavy Metal, but it’ll keep Iommi’s chops up as he prepares for Black Sabbath’s final curtain call – this time for real – on 5 July at Villa Park when he takes to the stage with metal’s original Fab Four for the Back To The Beginning one-day festival.

Sabbath are headlining. The lineup reads like a who's who of metal guitar. There will be sets from Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, Gojira, Halestorm, Alice In Chains, Lamb Of God, Anthrax and Mastodon.

Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello is musical director for the show and has put together an all-star band featuring Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan, Slash and Duff from Guns N’ Roses, Wolfgang Van Halen, Zakk Wylde, Anthrax’s Scott Ian, Ozzy Osbourne alumni Rudy Sarzo and Jake E Lee, and many more. Morello will no doubt play.

Hey, maybe Robbie Williams will be a surprise guest. Isn’t 2025 crazy?

Okay, speaking of Iommi guesting on other people’s records, Williams should be congratulating himself. This is a coup. Iommi does not make a habit of it. He guested on NWOBHM heroes Quartz’s 1977 debut album, but then he was producing his fellow Brummies so maybe that doesn’t count.

Notably he joined forces with Cathedral on Utopian Blaster, from the UK doom legends’ 1995 album, The Carnival Bizarre.

He also played on Diamond Head’s 1993 album, Death And Progress, on a track called Starcrossed (Lovers of the Night). Come to think of it, that is maybe what ChatGPT would come up with if you asked it to come up with a Ronnie James Dio-era Sabbath song-title.

Iommi joined Dio on Girlschool’s I Spy, from 2008’s guest-laden Legacy album, and contributed lead guitar to Candlemass’s Astorolus – The Great Octopus, from 2019’s The Door To Doom. And of course he did his old mate, Ozzy, a turn on Patient Number 9.

Black Sabbath’s 1975 album Sabotage is one of the band’s very best - but it also includes some of their weirdest music.

Guitarist Tony Iommi recalled in an interview with Classic Rock: “We wanted to do a rock album.” And certainly there are songs on Sabotage to rank among the heaviest that Sabbath ever recorded - songs such as Hole In The Sky and Symptom Of The Universe.

But this album also features what is surely the most bizarre track ever to feature on a Black Sabbath album - Supertzar, an ambient piece featuring the English Chamber Choir, and described by drummer Bill Ward as “a demonic chant”. And the weirdness on Sabotage doesn’t end there...

On their previous album Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, the band had experimented with synthesisers, played by a guest star, Rick Wakeman of progressive rock pioneers Yes.

On Sabotage, those experiments continued with Am I Going Insane (Radio), which was essentially a pop song, written by singer Ozzy Osbourne on a Moog synthesiser, which he played on the finished track.

“Oz drove us all nuts with that Moog thing,” Ward recalled, “but the song was great. And in hindsight, it was kind of a precursor for his solo career. His personality was blooming on this song.”

Strangest of all, at the very end of the album, after the last notes of the closing track The Writ, there is a 31-second snippet of music that was recorded by producer Mike Butcher without the band’s knowledge - and added during the mixing process.

“Microphones were plugged in all around the studio,” Butcher explained. “So one night, when Ozzy and Bill were messing around on the piano, I pushed the record button.”

What he captured was a joke song they named Blow On The Jug.

“This stupid fucking thing,” Ward said. “A drunken song that Ozzy and me would sing together in a van or on a plane.

“That’s me on piano, and Ozzy blowing on one of those brown cider jugs, playing it like a tuba.”

Tom Morello has shared some intel about Black Sabbath’s upcoming Villa Park gig, which is already shaping up to be the metal show of the century.

The Rage Against The Machine/Audioslave guitarist was asked to be musical director of the day by Sharon Osbourne and in an interview with The Independent, Morello described how between himself, Ozzy and Sharon, the three have gone about shaping the event.

“The North Star from the first conversation was to make this the greatest day in the history of heavy metal,” he said.

“Black Sabbath invented the genre… it’s a tribute to (them) but unlike other tributes, Black Sabbath’s going to play at the end of the night, and so it’s a chance for artists of all ages and branches of the heavy metal tree to pay respects by playing some of our own music that owes a debt to Black Sabbath, and then also have 14 to 16 of the greatest Black Sabbath cover bands that ever graced the stage.”

As we already know, the line-up that they’ve put together is simply astonishing: Guns N’ Roses, Metallica, Slayer, Tool, Pantera, Alice In Chains, Anthrax, Mastodon and Rival Sons. Then there is the ‘supergroup’ that is likely to include Billy Corgan, Sammy Hagar, Chad Smith and Andrew Watt, as well as Slash and Duff McKagan from Guns N’ Roses.

And there are likely to be more names added, according to Morello: “Some of the biggest artists who are performing have not been announced,” he revealed. “There’ll be some surprises during the day.”

Asked what fans should expect, Morello advised them to “get there early”.

He added: “I think it’ll be very emotional for Black Sabbath fans in the room and around the world on that day, to really give that band their due.”

Meanwhile, Zakk Wylde has been suggesting that 5 July may not be the end of the road for Ozzy after all. Speaking to the Birmingham Mail, the guitarist said: “The game plan is, let’s hope this is what happens, I mean, you always gotta stay on the bright side of life, because Oz was singing at the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame thing.

“Ozzy was just sitting on the chair and he was singing Mama, I’m Coming Home, and it sounded great. So hopefully we’ll just do this and then Oz will go ‘let’s fire up the machine again and we’ll do another tour.”

We’ll see. Tickets for 5 July? You’ll be lucky. When the Osbournes donated a pair of tickets to a charity auction in aid of a Birmingham children’s hospice that took place this week, one anonymous bidder pledged £16,700.

Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi reckons that the band’s dark image was great for getting publicity in their early days - but it could have cost him his life.

In an interview with Classic Rock, Iommi recalled how Sabbath’s heavy music and the references to Satan in their signature song Black Sabbath created a powerful mystique around the band.

“The image was good and bad, really,” Iommi said. “It created this thing, this kind of aura, and people wanted to come and see what we were like.

“So I think in one way it helped us. At one point we weren’t doing any interviews, so nobody knew much about us. I heard stories about people being frightened to meet us!”

Iommi said that he and the band’s bassist Geezer Butler had a keen interest in the occult.

“We were young and learning and trying to experience things,” he said. “So we were really interested in the occult, Geezer and I. Very interested in what it was like on the other side of life.

“I think in those days we were open to a lot of stuff. We tried a Ouija board and frightened each other!”

But as Iommi admitted, this dark image was - almost literally - a double-edged sword.

“With a name like Black Sabbath, we had all sorts of weird people coming to the gigs in America – witches and all sorts,” he said.

“There would be people coming to our hotel with black cloaks on, lighting candles. It was something that grew out of proportion.

“You never know what people will do. You didn’t know what sort of people would be around. Some of those religious weirdos were as dangerous as the Ku Klux Klan.

“And the most disturbing thing I ever had was when one person came on stage with a dagger to stab me. Very disturbing to say the least!

“We were playing this open-air show, and when we got to the venue, somebody had painted a cross on a door in red….

“We didn’t think much else of it. But later on we found out this bloke had cut his hand and drawn the cross in his blood.

“He was some religious freak.”

Iommi revealed that he had no idea how much danger he had been in that night.

“During that show, my amps were playing up and I really got pissed off,” he said. “I lost my temper and kicked my stack over and walked off. And as I’m walking off, this bloke’s behind me.

“He’d got past security but somebody managed to jump on him. I didn’t know what was happening. I was still moaning about my gear.

“It was only afterwards that I found out this bloke had a dagger and was trying to bump one of us off!”

Black Sabbath’s first album is effectively ground zero for heavy metal - and as guitarist Tony Iommi recalled, it was an album made under intense pressure.

In 2013, Iommi told Classic Rock how Sabbath recorded the album with an incredibly tight deadline and with a vision to revolutionise rock music.

“The idea was to make an album heavier than anything that had ever been heard before,” he said. “We wanted to make something different.

“We had only bass, drums, guitar and vocals. We didn’t have keyboards or a rhythm guitarist. The idea was to make the sound as big as we could for what we’d got.

“We were relying on [producer] Rodger Bain, because we’d never done a record before. It was very different for us to go into a studio with a producer.

“We knew nothing about recording. All we knew in those days was how to play the songs, like we did at gigs.

“Because we only had a couple of days to do the whole album, it was hard for us because you only had one go at each song. There was no time to keep going over and over the songs. We had one try and that was it.

“I remember when we did Warning, it was quite a long track – when we used to do it on stage it was fifteen minutes – but when we recorded it we cocked it up a bit.

“I said, ‘Can we do it again?’ And Rodger said, ‘Well, okay you can have one more go at it.’ And that was it. We were like, Fucking hell! It was a bit nerve-wracking. In the end, Rodger edited it down a bit.”

The album, titled simply Black Sabbath, was released on 13 February 1970, and peaked at No.8 on the UK chart.

As Iommi remembered: “We loved the idea of having an album out, but we never knew for one minute what was going to happen with it, of course. It was just exciting to be able to do an album.

“We were coming back from a European tour when we heard that the album was in the top ten. Bloody hell! We were in shock.”

Black Sabbath’s Vol.4 is more than just a great album. It is a monument to excess. And if one track in particular sums up the craziness of this band’s life in the early ’70s, it’s the weird instrumental with the joke title: FX.

As Rolling Stone accurately described it: “Vol. 4 is one of those difficult ‘cocaine’ albums that bands were fond of making back then. Sabbath was rich, bored, huge in America, and it was the Seventies—you do the math.”

During the summer of 1972, the four members of the band lived together in a mansion in Los Angeles, and it was there that the songs for Vol.4 were written and rehearsed.

As Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi recalled in an interview with Classic Rock: “We lived in a beautiful house in Bel Air. It had a ballroom and bar leading out to the garden, and we rehearsed in the bar area.

“It was a big room. We had the gear set up there, but we never thought for a minute that all the sound was going out across the valley!

“It was dead quiet outside. You could hear a pin drop at night.

“We used to write in the day and jam at night. It was a great atmosphere. We had a fabulous time.

“In this ballroom there was a grand piano. I’d never played piano before. But that’s where I leant to play, and the first thing I wrote on it was Changes.”

A beautiful ballad, Changes was a radical departure for Sabbath.

And there were other experiments on Vol.4.

The album’s opening track, Wheels Of Confusion, has the complexity of progressive rock.

The heaviest number, Supernaut, turns funky halfway through.

And then there is FX. 1min 44sec of odd noises from Iommi’s guitar.

As Iommi remembered it, the band were working at The Record Plant studio when FX was created on the spot.

“It was a mad time,” Iommi told Classic Rock. “We used to have this coke flown in especially, in sealed containers, sealed with wax. You’d peel the wax off and there are these phials of coke.

“We’d sit up all night. We used to make our own entertainment.

“And there was one day when we were in the studio and I took my guitar off and put it on the stand, and as I put it down it went, Boing! And that became FX.

“For the life of me I can’t think why we ended up taking our clothes off, but that’s how we recorded that track, prancing around, naked, banging the guitar."

“It was one of those stupid things that you do," Iommi said. "We were stoned, of course.

"We were always joking around. That was our release - to joke around or play jokes on each other."

The world is not exactly short of TV content about Ozzy Osbourne, but there’s a new documentary in the pipeline that sounds like it will delve a bit deeper than most of what we've already seen.

It’s called Ozzy Osbourne: No Escape From Now and is set to be aired on Paramount+ by the end of the year. It deals in particular with the singer’s last six years and the health problems he’s encountered, including his fall in 2019 and Parkinson’s diagnosis.

“This is Ozzy Osbourne like you’ve never seen before: an honest, warm and deeply personal portrait of one of the greatest rock stars of all-time,” a synopsis says, “detailing how the singer’s world shuddered to a halt six years ago, forcing him to contemplate who he really is, confront his own mortality and question whether or not he can ever perform on stage for one last time. Addressing his health issues and the impact of his Parkinson’s diagnosis, the film showcases the central role music continues to play in Ozzy’s life.”

Ozzy himself has said: “The last six years have been full of some of the worst times I’ve been through. There’s been times when I thought my number was up. But making music and making two albums saved me. I’d have gone nuts without music.”

It’s directed by the BAFTA award winner Tania Alexander, who’s best known for being one of the co-creators of the Channel 4 show Gogglebox. Filming began way back in early 2022 whilst Ozzy was working on his Patient Number 9 album. And it’s still in production so filming will continue into the summer, including the final Black Sabbath gig at Villa Park on July 5. I think we can already envisage what the redemptive feelgood ending is going to be, can’t we?

Contributors include Tony Iommi, Duff McKagan of Guns N’ Roses, Billy Idol, Chad Smith of the Chili Peppers, Robert Trujillo of Metallica and, of course, his wife Sharon.

The latter has described the doc as an “honest account” of what has happened to her husband since 2019. “It shows how hard things have been for him and the courage he has shown while dealing with a number of serious health issues, including Parkinson’s,” she said.

“It’s about the reality of his life now. We have worked with a production team we trust and have allowed them the freedom to tell the story openly. We hope that story will inspire people that are facing similar issues to Ozzy.”

Kiss star Gene Simmons says it very simply: “I've always loved and admired Black Sabbath. And can proudly say the early days of touring together will be a lifelong memory.”

But as he admits, there was a fierce rivalry between Sabbath and Kiss during their brief time together on a US tour in 1974.

Gene recalls: “The Sabbath of 1974 had all the adrenaline of a new band in a strange land doing what they believe in. There was no question Sabbath was going to do things their own way. Love them or hate them, this would be a band that would mark its own territory like an animal.

“Kiss was touring on its first album. We got an opening slot, thankfully, on the Sabbath tour… but only for three or four shows.

“It was at the Boston Theater in 1974, if memory serves me correctly…

“I was backstage fully made-up and ready to go out on stage with the band. Standing next to me was the great Geezer Butler. All five feet six inches of him! In my platform heels, I stood at about six feet nine inches tall.

“It's in my DNA – once the war paint was on, I became The Demon. And Geezer didn't quite know what to make of me.

“As he stood next to me, he looked me up and down. I looked down at him. I glared at him and stuck out my tongue, lowered my head so we were face-to-face with each other and said, ‘Aaahhhh!’

“Many years later, Ozzy either told me or I read it someplace – Geezer had come back and told him he felt threatened by the bass player in the opening act. He didn't think that was a good sign. And he was right!

“Our intention was to go out on stage and destroy all living things. We did.

“At the next show in Rochester, New York, our road manager was told that we would have to go on [stage] immediately. The problem was that the Sabbath amplifier line was too close to the edge of the stage, so we did not even have enough room to go by each other to get to the other side.

“What followed was a staring contest. We would not go on until the Sabbath amplifier line was pulled back. It was pulled back.

“On another occasion - perhaps it was in Albany, New York – Sabbath was nowhere to be found. We later learned they had checked into a hotel and when it was time to go to the concert hall, they could not find Ozzy. What had happened was he walked into an open hotel room, shut the door and went to sleep. The problem was he didn't go into his room!

“Needless to say, when Sabbath’s road manager went looking for Ozzy he was nowhere to be found. He was fast asleep in the stranger’s room.

“All of the above comes with a great deal of admiration, respect and love for one of the few bands who forged the way for countless others to follow.

“I will never forget the first time I ever heard the name Black Sabbath. It was an advertisement for their first album. It appeared in Rolling Stone. It said: Black Sabbath – louder than Led Zeppelin!!!’

"Louder and prouder, indeed.”

Ozzy Osbourne has warned fans not to expect him to be the singer he once was at what is being billed as his final show this summer.

On his Sirius XM radio show, Ozzy Speaks, the veteran frontman said he would only be partially on stage during the show. "I'm not planning on doing a set with Black Sabbath but I am doing little bits and pieces with them,” he said. “I am doing what I can, where I feel comfortable."

It’s no secret that the singer hasn’t been in the best of health these past few years. In 2022 he revealed that he has been battling Parkinson’s Disease for two decades. He was unable to perform at his induction into the Rock N’ Roll Hall Of Fame last October. In fact he gave his acceptance speech at ceremony whilst seated

He said he was trying to get as fit as he can be. "I am trying to get back on my feet. When you get up in the morning, you just jump out of bed. I have to balance myself, but I'm not dead. I'm still actively doing things."

This, of course, raises the question of who exactly will be singing the bulk of Black Sabbath’s set, if not Ozzy? There have been periods in the band’s long history when they have used other singers, most notable Ronnie James Dio and during the late '80s and '90s, Tony Martin. But Dio is sadly no longer with us and a reunion with Martin would seem unlikely given the bad blood between him and the band after his departure in the late '90s.

There is, of course, the option of using a selection of guest singers and given the line up of rock and metal royalty that will be on display at Villa Park on July 5, surely a viable one? No doubt all will be revealed in the coming weeks…

On this day (13 February) in 1970, Black Sabbath’s debut album was released. It was recorded in a matter of hours, but its impact would echo through the decades.

Titled simply Black Sabbath, the album is one of the seminal rock records, a touchstone for countless heavy metal bands. And it happened more by accident than design.

In 1968, when the four members of Black Sabbath’s original line-up first got together as The Polka Tulk Blues Band, their music was as advertised, inspired by the stars of the British blues-rock boom such as Fleetwood Mac. All four were born and raised in Birmingham –“within a mile of each other,” as singer John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne said.

Ozzy and guitarist Tony Iommi had known each other at school. Iommi and drummer Bill Ward had played in a band named Mythology, and bassist Terry ‘Geezer’ Butler previously played rhythm guitar for Ozzy’s band Rare Breed.

It was in early 1969, after a change of name from The Polka Tulk Blues Band to Earth, that Iommi heard the first Led Zeppelin album and vowed to make music that was, in his words, “even heavier”.

What Iommi discovered, by chance, was a sound of subliminal power. In a simple three-note riff, he unwittingly recreated a dissonant harmonic scale known for centuries as diabolus in musica – the Devil in music. Iommi’s riff was the foundation for a song in which heavy rock power was matched by visions of Satan and hellfire in Ozzy’s lyrics. In a stroke of genius, they named this song, and then rechristened the band, after a 1963 horror movie starring Boris Karloff: Black Sabbath.

The band's debut album was recorded in October 1969 at Regent Sound studio in London. According to Ozzy, it was completed in one session, “12 hours straight”. Iommi remembered it differently: three afternoons on consecutive days.

For much of the album the band played super-heavy, on riff-driven songs such as The Wizard, Behind The Wall Of Sleep and N.I.B.

In addition, there were two cover versions on which Sabbath exhibited a broader stylistic range. Evil Woman, essentially a pop song, was originally recorded by little-known Minnesota band Crow. There was also evidence of the band’s blues roots in their version of Warning, a 1967 single by The Aynsley Dunbar Retaliation, transformed by Sabbath into a trippy ten-minute jam.

But it was that one song, so dark and sinister, that defined the album and the band.

Black Sabbath was the album's opening track, prefaced by a chillingly atmospheric introduction: the sound of rainfall, rumbling thunder and the ominous tolling of a church bell.

In Iommi’s grinding riffing and Ozzy’s anguished wailing was a sound like nothing ever heard before.

“It had a certain vibe about it when we played the riff all together,” Iommi said. “It had this really spooky feeling.

“I used to like horror films and so did Geezer. I liked the power and the atmosphere in those films, and that had an impression on my writing. When you’re watching a horror film and you get that tingling sensation when something frightens you – I wanted to try to create that in music.”

And the Satanic imagery sealed the band’s reputation: Black Sabbath, the Devil’s disciples.

“It was great to have that kind of image,” Geezer Butler said, “because people were going, ‘Well, are they or aren’t they?’”

The album made the UK top ten, and in the US it sold a million.

Black Sabbath had arrived: as the heaviest of the heavy, and the scariest rock band on God’s Earth.

In February 1975, exactly 50 years ago, Black Sabbath were working on their sixth studio album Sabotage. It would become one of the greatest and most influential albums in rock history.

It was also the last classic album that Sabbath would make with singer Ozzy Osbourne.

The album was recorded at Morgan Studios in Willesden, north-west London, a state-of-the-art facility where Sabbath had made their previous album, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. The band worked at Morgan for a total of four months, split into three-week sessions.

Mike Butcher had been the engineer on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, and he was charged with producing Sabotage.

In an interview withy Classic Rock, Butcher recalled that the sessions ran to a loose schedule. “I’d arrive at two in the afternoon, but the band wouldn’t start showing up until four. And because Morgan had a bar, that’s where the guys would wait for the others to arrive. So most days, we’d start work at nine and go through till one or two the next morning.”

Guitarist Tony Iommi – identified by Mike Butcher as Black Sabbath’s “unofficial leader” – stated that Sabotage was in part a reaction to the complex style of Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, on which the band had combined their signature heavy metal with elements of progressive rock, aided by Yes keyboard player Rick Wakeman and even an orchestra.

“We could’ve continued getting more technical,” Iommi said, “using orchestras and everything else. But we wanted to do a rock album.”

Iommi said of Sabotage. “The sound was a bit harder than Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. My guitar sound was harder.”

Iommi’s heavy riffing is the dominant tone on Sabotage, not least on the song chosen as the album’s opening track, Hole In The Sky, which begins with the hum of amplifiers set at maximum volume and a scream of “Attack!”

The scream was an in-joke, delivered by Mike Butcher, who explained:“Sabbath had a supporting act who had a manager who would stand behind them on stage shouting, ‘Attack! Attack!’” says the producer. “So that’s what I shouted from the control room through the Tannoy.”

Even heavier was the album’s most famous and influential song, Symptom Of The Universe. Its bludgeoning, staccato riff would provide the template for Metallica and countless other metal bands, but it was more than a one-note head-banger. It ended in a funky coda, created by the band jamming while recording the track and subsequently overdubbed with acoustic guitar.

There were more left turns throughout the album. Iommi may have set out to make a more straightforward rock record, but Sabbath continued the experimentation they started on Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. And, ironically, it was Iommi who created the most bizarre and unorthodox song ever to feature on a Black Sabbath album: Supertzar.

More atmospheric even than the song that gave the band its name, Supertzar was a dark, dreamlike piece featuring the English Chamber Choir, and described by drummer Bill Ward as “a demonic chant”. Tubular bells, played by Ward, carried an echo of the 1973 movie chiller The Exorcist.

On this track, the only connection to conventional rock music was Iommi’s slow guitar riff, played like a death march.

Ozzy had no part to play on Supertzar, but what he heard as he observed the song being recorded was, in his words, “a noise like God conducting the soundtrack to the end of the world”.

Iommi said, with characteristic reserve, that “it sounded really different and really great”.

In stark contrast was Am I Going Insane (Radio), essentially a pop song written by Ozzy on a Moog synthesiser, which he played on the finished track.

“Oz drove us all nuts with that Moog thing,” Ward recalled, “but the song was great. And in hindsight, it was kind of a precursor for his solo career. His personality was blooming on this song.”

The ‘Radio’ in the title was British rhyming slang: Radio Rental – mental.

As bassist Geezer Butler said, Ozzy’s lyrics were “definitely autobiographical”.

Sabotage is essentially the connoisseurs’ Black Sabbath album.

A retrospective review in Rolling Stone stated: “Sabotage continues the theme of themeless epic suites with twisted stoner-prog anthems that rock as hard as the early days, but also hyperextend themselves in unexpected ways.

“It might be the most underrated of their albums, and was certainly the original band's last stab at greatness together.”

If there is one album, above all others, which defines heavy metal, it is Paranoid, Black Sabbath’s masterpiece.

The colossal power in classic songs such as War Pigs, Iron Man and the title track was the template for generations of heavy bands to follow.

It was also the album that confirmed Sabbath as major stars, hitting No.1 in the UK and No.12 in the US.

Paranoid was released in 1970 just seven months after the band’s self-titled debut.

The whole album was completed within four days, according to guitarist Tony Iommi. And it was at the very last moment that the title track was written and recorded, after producer Rodger Bain insisted that the album needed one more song.

Iommi wrote the speedy, fuzz-toned riff. Bassist Geezer Butler already had a rough draft of lyrics and the title. And once singer Ozzy Osbourne had worked out a vocal melody, the song was complete. Written and recorded within an hour, it is the essence of Black Sabbath distilled into less than three minutes.

At first, Ozzy disliked the song. As he later explained: “I thought it was too pop. I rebelled against it.”

Despite the singer’s protests, Paranoid was issued as a single on July 17, 1970 – two months ahead of the album.

By August, it had reached No.4 on the UK chart.

In the wake of this success, the album – originally titled War Pigs – was hastily renamed Paranoid. But there was no time to change the album artwork, a somewhat bizarre visual interpretation of War Pigs, featuring a blurry, wild-eyed warrior figure in a motorcycle crash helmet, brandishing a sword and shield.

Paranoid is an album full of bad vibes. War Pigs is the thunderous opening salvo, a furious anti-war tirade that resonated powerfully at a time when the US was still embroiled in the Vietnam conflict. There is also an echo of Vietnam in Butler’s lyrics for the heroin blues Hand Of Doom, while Iron Man is a sci-fi horror fantasy, beginning with Iommi bending notes to fearsome effect before a leaden riff kicks in.

There is a brief moment of calm in Planet Caravan, a tale of astral travel with a trippy, spaced-out ambience. There is also a touch of humour in the album’s final track, Fairies Wear Boots, a heavy number named in reference to a gang of skinheads with whom the band had a punch-up during a British tour.

But on an album in which the central themes are death, destruction and insanity, Black Sabbath laid down a marker as the heaviest band on Earth.

Paranoid is arguably the most influential heavy metal album of them all.

In its dark power are the roots of bands such as Judas Priest and Slayer, and various sub-genres including black metal, doom, and stoner rock.

Two of the most significant bands of later years covered songs from this album – Faith No More with War Pigs, Pantera with Planet Caravan.

As for the song that Ozzy originally dismissed as “too pop”, he has sung it ever since, with Sabbath and without. As he said: “I couldn’t go onstage and not do Paranoid.”

Heavy metal fans got an early Christmas present this week when rare concert footage of Black Sabbath was posted online.

The 30-minute clip was filmed at Sabbath’s show at the 10,000-capacity Selland Arena in Fresno, California on 9 November 1976.

This show was part of Sabbath’s Technical Ecstasy tour and features the original and classic line-up of the band: Ozzy Osbourne (vocals), Tony Iommi (guitar), Geezer Butler (bass) and Bill Ward (drums).

The six songs featured are Symptom Of The Universe, Snowblind, All Moving Parts (Stand Still), War Pigs, Gypsy and Children Of The Grave.

Technical Ecstasy was Black Sabbath’s seventh studio album. It was after the following album, 1978’s Never Say Die!, that Ozzy Osbourne was fired from the band in a move that shocked rock fans.

But in this footage from the Technical Ecstasy tour the band are a tight unit and Ozzy commands the stage brilliantly - especially during Snowblind, when he yells at the audience: “Everybody clap your hands and boogie!”

It’s classic stuff!

Geezer Butler has been talking about the time the rest of Black Sabbath sacked him - and then promptly forgot all about it.

The bassist was speaking with LifeMinute TV about his new-ish memoir Into The Void, when he alighted on the state of the band in the late 70s.

“Everybody was totally out of their brains all the time," he admitted. "We’d sold millions and millions of albums and sold out thousands of gigs around the world. We still hardly had any money to show for it, and we'd sort of realised that we were being ripped off by the management.”

Things came to a head in 1977. “I think people just wanted a scapegoat for the whole thing - it just happened to be me at the time. Bill Ward came to the house and said, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re fired.’ ‘Oh, thanks very much. Why?’ ‘You don’t seem into it any more.’

“I was actually relieved because we were under so much pressure at the time. [It was] probably the best two weeks that I’d had for years! I could just relax and not think about the business, or getting albums together, or anything like that.”

But the rest of the band were in such a state at the time that they forgot that they had sacked the bassist. “About two or three weeks later, Bill calls me up and says, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘We’re here, rehearsing!’" he explained. “I said, ‘I thought I was fired… You told me I was fired from the band!’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah - forgot about that.’ So I went down to rehearsal, nobody said anything about it, [and we] just carried on as normal.”

Butler did leave the band briefly a couple of years later, but was back on board for the post-Ozzy album, 1980’s Heaven And Hell. He left for a few years in the 1980s and again in the mid '90s, but has been there consistently since 1997.

The bassist also talked about the possibility of the four core members performing one more time. Although he doubted whether a full reunion would ever happen now, he said: “Maybe a one off show. Ozzy was talking about when he does his farewell concert, which he still wants to do... he suggested for the four of us to get up on stage and maybe do three or four songs together and then that would be it. But definitely no more tours.”

The new football season is just a few weeks away (I know...) ‘Tis the season then for Premier League clubs to launch their new kit, which in the 21st Century tends to be conducted via social media. Aston Villa though have chosen to do theirs with the help of a pair of bona fide rock legends.

Black Sabbath’s Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler feature prominently in the one minute-long Youtube clip. The two can be seen chatting on the phone, with Ozzy suggesting they play Villa Park. “As long as I’m left wing,” Geezer replies. And then we’re into a montage featuring Villa fans, staff, manager Unai Emery, all soundtracked by Paranoid.

At one point goalkeeper Emiliano Martinez can be seen in the dressing room and says ‘who’s that?’ pointing at Butler, who’s stripped down, ready to play and asking ‘do you want me through the middle, or on the left?’ 

Seconds later Geezer can be seen, eyes closed, listening to the Champions League theme on his stereo (Villa will play in the prestigious European competition this season for the first time since the early 1980s).

Then there’s an announcement on the tannoy: ‘Number Eleven: The Prince Of Darkness’. ‘Who’s that?’ asks a disbelieving John McGinn. ‘The biggest frontman to ever come out of Birmingham,’ answers Ozzy, not unreasonably.

It goes without saying that Osbourne and Butler are lifelong fans of the club. And that comment about the band playing Villa Park isn’t there for show either. Earlier this year Sharon Osbourne revealed that whilst her husband is done with touring, he’d like to play two final shows at Villa Park to “say goodbye” to fans.

In other Sabbath news Geezer Butler has been opening up about his battles with clinical depression. In an interview with NPR’s Bullseye With Jesse Thorn, the bassist talked about how he used to hide it out of fear: “Back then nobody ever said anything about depression or anything like that, and people were terrified to mention that you might be depressed 'cause you automatically thought you were gonna be taken away to a mental hospital and be locked away forever. So you couldn't talk about it to people in case that happened.”

Things changed in the 1990s after he suffered a nervous breakdown. “And I went to this doctor, the usual doctor, and I just explained everything to him and he told me that I was clinically depressed and he put me on Prozac. And after six weeks, I finally came out of the depression. And I thought, 'Oh, yeah. This is what I'm supposed to feel like.' And ever since that, I've been okay."

Paranoid, of course, was originally inspired by these feelings of mental anguish, which the success of that album did little to alleviate. "I enjoyed the success of the album, absolutely,” Butler explained. “People would say, 'You've got all this money coming in. You've got a No 1 album. What have you got to be depressed about?' But it's like a disease. There's nothing you can do about it, no matter how much money you've got or how happy you are with your job.”

Geezer Butler has been talking about his band’s formative years to Matt Pinfield.

In an interview on Pinfield’s New And Approved, the Black Sabbath bassist, who published his memoir Into The Void last year, revealed that in their early days the band were so impoverished that they had to boil his bass strings to clean them because he couldn’t afford to buy new ones.

"In those days, I couldn't afford a set of strings, so I'd play the same strings for about six months until they were completely worn out. And then, what we used to do is boil all our strings, so all the crap would come off them, and they'd sound almost new again. And that was the way we did it because we couldn't afford to buy new strings."

It was during this period of penury when the band were still called Earth that Tony Iommi was poached by Jethro Tull after the two bands played a gig together. “Ian Anderson came out into the audience and he was transfixed by Tony. And we thought ‘what’s all this about’. At the end of the gig Ian asked Tony to come outside and asked him to join.”

Butler suggests that this was a pivotal moment in Sabbath’s development. “It was the best thing that happened to us because he went down to London, rehearsed with them for a week and said ‘I’m not going to do this. Ian’s trying to tell me what to play and only I know how I’m going to play’. He came back and said ‘Look, to be like Jethro Tull we’ve got to write our own music and take everything really seriously from now on.’”

The band’s first album was recorded in cramped circumstances, on a shoestring as Butler recalls in the interview: "We had two days in the studio because you only had £500 to make the album, which is like $700. And so, the only way we could do it is just to play live. 

"It was recorded straight away as a live album on day one. And then, the next day, we did some vocal overdubs, and Tony did some guitar overdubs, fixed a few things, and that was it.”

“We'd never been in the studio before, so we didn't know [much about studio work]. The way we played it at that particular moment was the way it was recorded, and that was the way the album was put out."

Into The Void gained positive reviews when it was initially published last year. It’s recently joined the other Sabbath memoirs – Tony Iommi’s Iron Man and Ozzy’s Memoirs Of A Madman - in paperback.

By the time Black Sabbath began their Never Say Die UK tour on 16 May 1978 in Sheffield, the wheels were perhaps starting to come off the Ozzy-era of the band. And it didn't help that their support band was starting to get more attention than them. But looking back now, Sabbath bassist Geezer Butler can see Van Halen's presence on the tour as more of a double-edged sword.

"They were great – I really liked them", Geezer tells Brave Words in a new interview promoting his autobiography, Into The Void: From Birth To Black Sabbath-And Beyond. "They did one of my favourite all-time Kinks songs You Really Got Me, so I immediately really liked them from the cover of that and that was one of their first hits singles. But as the tour went on, cracks started to appear between the upcoming LA rockers and the established Birmingham godfathers of heavy.

"David Lee Roth became like an Ozzy clone, and it was really upsetting Ozzy at the time," explains Geezer. "Whatever Ozzy did one night, David Lee Roth would say the same thing the next night, and it was upsetting Ozzy." There was also tension between Tony Iommi and Eddie Van Halen on the guitar side. 

"Eddie was doing these extended solos, so Tony had to have word about that," adds the bassist. The two would later become close friends, but Geezer also saw distinct advantages to Van Halen's presence on the tour. 

"But it was good because they brought in this whole younger audience for us and they actually brought in some women and girls [laughs] that we'd never really had at our gigs. But what pissed us off was Warner Brothers completely concentrated on Van Halen and it was almost like we were the support band," says Geezer. "Warner Brothers were like, 'You're old hat and Van Halen are the future'. They did everything for Van Halen and nothing for us – no promotion for us whatsoever. But [Van Halen] were great guys and a great band [and there were] long-lasting friendships – especially Tony and Eddie." 

Sabbath's time would roll around again with Ozzy, and their last reunion even birthed a new studio album in the shape of 13. The 2013 Rick Rubin-produced album saw a back-to-basics approach with Sabbath seemingly going back to their roots, but it's becoming clear that some of the band were not satisfied with the results. 

"When we did the 13 album that took forever," reflects Geezer. "And some of it was great, and some of it not so good. It just didn't have the same feeling as the old '70s albums or even Heaven & Hell… I think the longer you take over something, it becomes forced in the end and you lose the initial rawness and feel of the music."

Neither the bassist or bandmate Iommi believe they would repeat the experience of working with Rubin again.

"Nope," he laughs. "He certainly wouldn't work with me ever again, or Tony. Tony was incredibly disappointed with him. In fact Tony took some of the master tapes and redid them."

Ozzy Osbourne himself lamented to Stereogum in 2022 when asked if he felt good about the record being their final creative statement. “Not really, because, to be perfectly honest, I didn’t really get a charge from the album," the singer said. "Although [producer] Rick Rubin is a good friend of mine, I wasn’t really… I was just singing.

“It was like stepping back in time, but it wasn’t a glorious period," he continued. "Though Geezer did a lot of lyric writing for me, which he’s very, very good at. It wasn’t an earth-shattering experience for me." Ozzy also suggested in the same interview that he didn't regard 13 a true Black Sabbath album because original drummer Bill Ward didn't play on it – Rage Against The Machine sticksman Brad Wilk performed session duties for the record. 

On that note, Geezer admits he still doesn't know why Bill Ward was fired from the band after they'd started working on 13 "I still haven't got an answer from anybody [as to] who fired him and why," he tells Brave Words. "I mean there's been rumours about his health and that kind of thing but I was listening to stuff that we were doing with Bill on that 13 album and I love it – it really does sound like the old Sabbath, the first three albums, the drumming on it and I love that kind of thing."

Ward later turned down the band's offer to play with the band on "two or three songs" when they toured and felt they "couldn't risk it" when it came to possible health issues once the world tour was underway. But perhaps there's a chance to put things right to some extent… 

"Ozzy's been texting me about doing one final show and that's it, with Bill," Geezer reveals. "But it's just not gonna happen… but then I always said the original Black Sabbath wouldn't get back together and then the next day the next Ozzy called me up said, "[We need] to get the band back together!' You say these things and hopefully if a miracle happens it would be great to do it but it's up to everybody's health and how they feel about it."

Geezer's perspective is clear on the matter though

"I'd love it to happen to do a final [show] even if it's just one song with all four of us with Bill on the drums. It certainly couldn't be a tour, it could only be one or two shows and three or four songs I suppose. But that would be it, it wouldn't be a tour or anything like that."

• Geezer Butler: “Drugs never made me play better. I’d think so at the time - then when listening to it back sober, I’d have to redo everything”

It's no secret that actor Jason Momoa plays bass and guitar, has acquired some dream instruments and even got to jam with some of his heroes. But he's never been in a band or played a gig before. That all changed last night with the debut performance by his new trio called Oof Tatata (Momoa applied to trademark the name on 9 April). We say new, but the three musicians involved go way back. 

"I've known Kenny Dale and Mike Hayes for about 20 years and these guys taught me how to play music," said the Game Of Thrones alumni introducing the trio's set at the New Zealand wrap party at the end of filming for the long-awaited Minecraft film. "But I never wanted to play in a band, but now times have changed so this is the first show."

He picked a great occasion for the debut gig because fellow Minecraft castmates Danielle Brookes, and Jack Black (alongside Rita Ora) were on hand to help out – the latter two duetting on a celebratory take on Stevie Nicks' classic Edge OF Seventeen with Momoa on Fender Precision Bass, Hayes on Buddy Guy Strat and Dale on drums. 

Hayes was the lead singer for much of the set that included versions of The Stooges' I Wanna Be Your Dog, Led Zeppelin's In My Time Of Dying and Jimi Hendrix's Voodoo Child.

Black returned for a thunderous take on Black Sabbath's The Wizard before Brookes delighted the guests on a duet with Hayes of the Dean Dillon and Linda Hargrove-penned country classic Tennessee Whiskey – most recently made famous by Chris Stapleton.   

Momoa swapped to a wonderfully worn-looking Jazz Bass for a take on Metallica's Whom The Bell Tolls fronted by Black and his mighty bellow. 

From the clip above, this trio has chops as well as star power and Momoa promises "more to come". We look forward to hearing it! 

• Minecraft: The Movie is due for release in 2025.

Join us for our traditional look back at the news and features that floated your boat this year. 

Best of 2023: When you're very good at what you do, you can get headhunted. And that's especially true in rock n' roll where the departure of key band members (or dissatisfaction with them) can lead to hard questions and unexpected propositions.

 Just how close did we come to hearing Rory Gallagher's maverick blues in the Stones, Michael Schenker's cocked wah in Aerosmith or Michael Bolton's soaring soul vocals fronting Black Sabbath?

Let's find out… 

Shuggie Otis – The Rolling Stones 

The first of a few Stones propositions, the psychedelic soul singer-songwriter got a call from the band's touring pianist Billy Preston (more on him later) in the mid-seventies to see if would be interested in joining the lineup for a tour. 

Otis had recently got to the end of a long creative tunnel to release his own album Inspiration Information, and the decision was easy for him. “I was so excited about my own music coming out that nothing really appealed to me about wanting to be in anybody’s group,” he told Rolling Stone in 2013.

“I didn’t want to be a sideman,” he explained to the Guardian in 2016 about his mindset at the time. “I wanted to do my own music. ”I could have been an instant millionaire, a few times, probably, but that wasn’t on my mind at all.”

Myles Kennedy – Led Zeppelin

This one got far enough down the line for Myles Kennedy, Jimmy Page, John Paul Jones and Jason Bonham to have jammed together more than once, following a call to the Alter Bridge vocalist from the drummer. Fresh from the high of Zeppelin's 02 Arena reunion in 2007, but knowing Robert Plant did not want to take it further, the trio set about moving forward the following year with another singer.

Kennedy's vocal ability was obvious, and combined with his deep knowledge of Zeppelin's back catalogue it put him firmly in the frame. But he wasn't the only one; Steven Tyler also jammed with them. Kennedy made enough of an impression after his first session with the band to be invited back for four days a few months later.

"I should say that it was never supposed to be 'Led Zeppelin' per se, because how could it be Led Zeppelin?" Kennedy told us in 2010. "I think they were just itching to play again. Still, they weren't really sure of what they wanted to do exactly. What happened was, I got together with them one day in June of 2008 and we just jammed on some ideas. Everything went really well, and as you can imagine, I was just flattered beyond all belief to be in the same room with those guys. I mean, everything I ever learned about rock, I learned from Led Zeppelin. Just being near Jimmy Page was unbelievable. All the guys! Hearing their stories, the whole experience…it was something I'll always treasure."

So why didn't it go any further?

"Well, I'm not really sure," Kennedy admitted to us. "Again, I just don't think they really could decide on what they wanted to do. I did get together with them again a few months later, and this time we spent about a week jamming on some ideas. I didn't do any actual writing with them – it was all very informal. There was just so much going on around them, and once all the talk got out about 'Led Zeppelin is going to tour'…I'm not really sure why things didn't happen, but that's OK."

Michael Bolton – Black Sabbath, Ted Nugent, Journey

Now this is a strange one – and not for the obviously surreal proposition of the Soul Provider singing War Pigs in 1982. No, it's because one party denies it was ever even a remote possibility. Spoiler: it's not Tony Iommi. 

"Me and [bassist Geezer Butler] had to rethink the whole thing," Iommi wrote in his 2012 autobiography Iron Man. "We had a million tapes sent in from different singers and most of them were horrible. One of them was from Michael Bolton. I didn't know him at the time. We had Michael come in and we had him sing Heaven and Hell, War Pigs and Neon Knights. He was quite good, but he wasn't exactly what we were looking for then. We dropped a bollock there, didn't we? Michael Bolton! A little bit of a mistake."

That all sounds too specific to be a misunderstanding, and Iommi returned to the subject again in 2020.

"I found David Coverdale, and he said, 'Oh, I just got this band together, Whitesnake. Why didn't you find me before?'" Iommi told Gibson TV . "I said, '[Black Sabbath vocalist Ronnie James Dio] hadn't left before; it's happening now.'

"So, there was a lot of looking for another singer, and we would audition various singers — including Michael Bolton, believe it or not," Iommi added. "He was one of them, which was an odd one. It just went on a bit, and we couldn't decide."  

And what say Bolton in all of this? He says it never happened. "That's a rumour," he told Malaysia's Lite in the clip above. "I think people mix it up because my rock group was Blackjack...we did two albums for Polygram in the late '70s, those were part of my rock years."

Bolton does add that he discussed joining Ted Nugent's band as a vocalist though, instead deciding to focus on his solo career. But that's not all; he was also briefly in the running to replace Steve Perry in Journey following the singer's 1987 departure.

"We thought about it for a second," Journey guitarist Neal Schon told Louder in a reader Q&A in 2012. Michael definitely had pipes – he was pretty bionic when I worked with him. But even then there was a lot of personality clashing. I didn’t feel that we would get too far, that’s all I can tell you."

In the same interview Schon alluded to some of that 'clashing' in a separate experience he had with Bolton.

"Michael Bolton was a little eccentric," he opined. "I played the blues guitar solo on his version of (Sittin’ On) The Dock Of The Bay, and Bolton made me re-do my solo about 200 times." Ouch. 

Marc Ford – Guns N' Roses 

Former Black Crowe Marc Ford recently detailed the time he was approached, and declined, the chance to play alongside Slash as Izzy Stradlin's replacement in the early '90s.

“The music of the Crowes spoke to me a bit more,” Ford reflected recently with Guitar World about choosing the Robinson brothers over Axl and Co. “But also – and even Slash agreed with me on this – the Crowes were a better fit for me over Guns N’ Roses because, with the Crowes, I could have more of a voice.”

“If I had joined Guns N’ Roses that would have basically been me filling the role of someone having to back up Slash,” he added. “I don’t think it would have been all that fulfilling or satisfying to do that. I would have gotten bored, and that would have been dangerous…”

Zakk Wylde - Guns N' Roses 

Zakk got much closer to becoming a hired Gun than Ford; he jammed with the band for a week in the mid '90s when Slash and Duff McKagan were still part of the lineup, and that period even sewed the creative seeds of a song.

“[Zakk] brought energy and enthusiasm that was lacking within Guns at the time, wrote McKagan in his 2011 autobiography. "‘We can build on the legacy,’ he said excitedly. ‘We can make something great. Listen to this.’ He saw a piano against the wall and sat down and elegantly played it. I had no idea he could play piano at all, much less like this.

"We recorded a few demos with him, but nothing panned out," Duff added. One of those demos would become Rose-Petalled Garden, a song on the first Black Label Society album, 1998's Sonic Brew.

Paul Rodgers – The Doors, Deep Purple 

When you're one of the greatest blues-rock vocalists of all time, people will call, and sometimes those people are the members of The Doors and Deep Purple.

Paul Rodgers' illustrious career has seen him collaborate with guitar greats including Paul Kossoff, Jimmy Page and Brian May, but if it wasn't for his commitments to his own projects at the time we could have seen him in at least one other classic band. 

Following the death of Jim Morrison in 1971 the surviving members of The Doors were serious enough about approaching Rodgers to take on the lead singer role that they flew to London to find him.  "[The] thing is, at that time, I had buried myself in the country, working on things, and they couldn't get a hold of me," Rodgers told The Pulse Of Radio in 2011.  "My jaw actually dropped like in a cartoon when Robby [Krieger, guitarist] told me this," the singer added. "Would I have joined them? I dunno. It's hard to say, looking back. But I think not. I tend to form bands, that's what I do. Although it's always flattering to be asked!"

A similar situation arose in 1973 when Rodgers got the call to replace the departing Ian Gillan in Deep Purple. "Free had played with Deep Purple in Australia and it was our very last show," Rodgers told Hoston Press in 2007, confirming the DP rumour. "I got along really well with [Purple] keyboardist Jon Lord and we exchanged numbers. Later, I got a call to [join], but I was forming Bad Company at the time, so it wasn’t possible." 

Michael Schenker – Aerosmith, The Rolling Stones, Ozzy Osbourne, Motörhead

The Flying V firebrand was certainly in demand in the seventies and early eighties. Starting with Ozzy Osbourne's search for Randy Rhoad's replacement…

"I was kind of tempted," Schenker told Full In Bloom in 2022. "I had only just left UFO and the Scorpions, and I had already auditioned for Aerosmith. When I was approached by Ozzy, he told me, “You were Randy Rhoads’s favorite guitarist. I want you to join.” It was kind of strange to deal with that situation because Ozzy called me in the middle of the night, and he was obviously very confused and disturbed and begged me to join. I considered it heavily, but something was pulling me away. I had to analyze what was going on. I didn’t quite understand myself."

The guitarist's instincts told him to focus on his own music, rather than playing the parts of another player. Nevertheless, following advice from his management Schenker actively auditioned for Aerosmith to replace Joe Perry following his own walkout from The Scorpions on their 1979 tour for the Lovedrive album. But Aerosmith claimed Schenker made a terrible first impression before he even played a note.

In the official Aerosmith book Walk This Way, Schenker is described as walking into a rehearsal room and greeting vocalist Stephen Tyler, guitarist Brad Whitford, bassist Tom Hamilton and drummer Joey Kramer with the following announcement: “Hello, I’m taking over. Before I join your band, I want it clear I’m taking over right now. Here – my jacket – take and hang up.”

Schenker denies this. “What happened was that [manager] Peter [Mensch] flew me to New York," the guitarist told Classic Rock. "Steven wasn’t doing so good at the time, and I wasn’t in the best shape either. I ended up sat in my hotel room for five days waiting for something to happen. And when it did… it was worthless. Nobody was in a fit state to make it work.

“But later, when I started the Michael Schenker Group [in 1980], Joey Kramer and Tom Hamilton wanted to be my rhythm section,” he added. “We did some rehearsals but then just as we were getting somewhere Steven got better, so they went back to Aerosmith.” All's well that ends well, but then there was the Stones…

Schenker allegedly ignored the call to audition for the legendary band in 1973 when he arrived in the UK as a teenager to join UFO.  As he explains in the clip above, he received a phone call at the lodgings he was staying at, asking if he'd like to audition for the Stones. A flustered Schenker told them he'd call back. He never did. Then there was Motörhead…

When he first put Motörhead together, Lemmy asked me to be the guitarist," Schenker told Metal Talk in 2016. "It was many years ago, but we toured together when he was in Hawkwind and I was with UFO. We toured the States together, and I saw Lemmy every day, but later when he started to put Motörhead together, he approached me to be his lead guitarist but I wasn't interested… I couldn't see that it would be something for me. I declined. I just couldn't see how it would work."

Billy Preston – The Beatles 

Preston would have been an asset to any band he played in – which is why both the Stones and Beatles called on the keyboardist and vocalist's session services. He'd befriended the Fab Four as far back as 1962 and, along with Tony Sheridan, is the only non-Beatle to be given a credit on one of their recordings at the band's request. In Preston's case it was for the 1969 single Get Back, credited at The Beatles with Billy Preston. 

It was during this time that Preston's role in the band became ever more integral, as captured in the Get Back film. John Lennon suggested to the band that Preston could join, while McCartney argued it was hard enough to reach compromises between the four of them as it was.

It was during Harrison's time out from the band after temporarily quiting in the midst of the sessions that Clapton was considered as a replacement. But it wasn't needed in the end; during his time away, Harrison saw Preston performing with Ray Charles in London and asked him if he'd like to return to work with the Beatles alongside him. Relations between the band members very quickly improved as a result of Preston's presence.

“It’s interesting to see how nicely people behave when you bring a guest in, because they don’t want everybody to know they’re so bitchy,” Harrison wrote in the Beatles book Anthology. “Suddenly everybody’s on their best behaviour.”

“He got on the electric piano, and straight away there was 100 per cent improvement in the vibe in the room,” he added. “Having this fifth person was just enough to cut the ice that we’d created among ourselves."

Corey Taylor - Anthrax, Velvet Revolver 

Even though he was in one of the biggest metal bands in the world with Slipknot, and in a second band with Stone Sour, Taylor clearly couldn't resist trying some alternative shoes on for size when two bands were looking to recruit new vocalists. And he went surprisingly far down the line with one of them.

Taylor recorded around 10 songs with Velvet Revolver in 2010 as he was reportedly lined up as Scott Weiland's replacement, even going as far as to "neither confirming or denying" he was the new vocalist. Duff McKagan certainly sounded keen in the clip above from 12 years ago, but it seems Slash was less so.

"I love Corey to death but something about it was just a little too… what’s the word for it, you know how Corey sings, it’s very macho kind of thing." Slash revealed to Rolling Stone Australia in the clip below. "But it didn’t have certain elements I thought it needed so we just didn’t go down that path. That was the closest [to finding Scott's replacement] so far.” 

Those nine or ten songs remain unheard outside of the inner circle.  "The world will probably never hear them, which is fine, because I would want another crack at kind of working on some of that stuff anyway, Taylor told Loudwire. "But that will never happen, so it's all good."

A few years before that Taylor nearly became the frontman for New York thrash icons Anthrax, but that time it wasn't a band member that put the kibosh on it.

 “That actually started as an idea because of an acoustic gig that I did with Scott [Ian] and Frankie Bello at a place in New York," Taylor told Eddie Trunk in the 2020 clip shown below. "Afterward, we were all kind of just hanging out, and the half-joking line got thrown out, ‘Hey, wouldn’t it be cool if you joined Anthrax?’” Corey recalled on SiriusXM's Trunk Nation Virtual Invasion. “And we all laughed, and then we all stopped. And we all just went, ‘Hmmm. That could [be] interesting.’

Anthrax were without a singer at the time. “It was between Joey [Belladonna] and John [Bush], so everything was kind of up in the air," added Taylor. "We talked about it more and more, and it was something that I was really, really into.”

Slipknot's label Roadrunner had other ideas; the Iowa band's next album – that became 2008's All Hope is Gone – took priority. “It was the first time I had ever felt like I was kind of backed into a corner," said Taylor. "Not that I didn’t wanna do a Slipknot album, but I was so into the idea of doing an Anthrax album. And I remember having to call and tell the [Anthrax] guys that I wasn’t gonna be able to make it. It broke my heart so hard. But, obviously, things worked out for the better for them.”

It took a little while. The band ended up recording their next album [that became Worship Music] with vocalist Dan Nelson before he parted ways with the band in 2009 before it could be released. John Bush would return to help them for a live commitment before vocalist Belladonna officially came back to re-record Nelson's parts on a reworked Worship Music that finally saw a 2011 release. Metal sure is complicated sometimes. 

Dave Grohl – Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers

Dave Grohl was in an understandably dark place following Kurt Cobain's suicide in 1994. He hadn't played drums publicly since his last show with Nirvana in Germany on 1 March that year, then Tom Petty came calling.

“Someone from my management calls and says ‘Hey, Tom Petty just called and wants to know if you’ll play drums with them on Saturday Night Live?’” recalled Grohl in the Petty documentary Runnin' Down A Dream. The Heartbreakers were between drummers follower the departure of Stan Lynch and Grohl was shocked to be asked.

"What the f*** is he calling me for? He couldn’t find a good drummer?” wondered Grohl. His hard-hitting performance on the show for the two songs the band played reminded everyone exactly why he was asked; muscular on Honey Bee's intro (a favourite Petty song of Grohl's) before sensitively syncopating with the guitar dynamics in the verses. "It’s like the kind of thing a bunch of 16-year-olds would play in the garage to get off," said Grohl. "It’s killer. It’s a barn burner.”

If SNL was a stealth audition, Grohl aced it. Later, Petty called to offer him the drum job. "I just felt weird about just going right back to the drums because it would have just reminded me of being in Nirvana,” Grohl admitted to Howard Stern in 2021. 

“It would have been sad for me personally. It would’ve been an emotional thing to be behind the drumset every night and not have Kurt there.”  Instead, Grohl took the unexpected path of becoming a frontman himself with the Foo Fighters. And that turned out pretty well didn't it. 

Adrian Smith, Phil Collen – Def Leppard, Iron Maiden 

A very unusual vice-versa prospect here. Phil Collen may well have got the job as Iron Maiden's replacement for Dennis Stratton… but there was a clear snag. "They asked me to come down and I wasn't really interested," Collen admitted to Inside Out in 2008. "I have known them guys for years. I used to go to school with the original singer Paul DiAnno, who I have known since I was six. All the guys grew up in the same area as me, they're lovely guys, I love 'em, but it's a different type of music. I was in a glam rock band [Girl] and now I'm in Def Leppard… which is more up my street."

Collen ended up joining Leppard to replace Pete Willis and tracked the solos on 1983's Pyromania, which did pretty well as we recall with 10 million sales in the US alone. Adrian Smith ended up getting the Maiden job and it all worked out very well indeed, until Smith quit the British metallers in 1990. When Leppard was looking for a new guitarist after the tragic death of Steve Clark in 1991, Smith applied to audition. And he was in illustrious company.

Collen confirmed in a press conference earlier this year that the band invited five people they knew to audition – including Smith, former Whitesnake man John Sykes and a young musician from Birmingham called Huey Lucas. "Vivian [Campbell] just fit in straight away; it was just like [it was] meant to be," said Collen. [But] Adrian is great — he's a great singer. That was one of the other things [we looked for], if you can sing."

“John could sing his ass off,” Leppard frontman Joe Elliot told Classic Rock. “And he wrote Still Of The Night for Whitesnake. Adrian I adore, and in the end it worked out well for him because he’s back in Maiden where he belongs. We also tried out a young unknown kid from Birmingham, Huey Lucas. Great player, but his voice wasn’t that strong. Vivian was always the number-one candidate. For us it wasn’t about how well you could play, it was more about how well you can sing. And more importantly, we’ve got to get on with this person.”

For his part, Smith has suggested he might talk about his perspective on it all in his next book, but as Joe Elliot noted, he ended up rejoining Maiden in 1999 anyway, alongside returning vocalist Bruce Dickinson. And everyone rocked happily ever after. 

Patty Smyth – Van Halen 

Van Halen with a female vocalist is a very interesting prospect – and it really could have happened. The former Scandal singer, who later enjoyed a hit duetting with The Eagles's Don Henley on Sometimes Love Just Ain't Enough, found fans in Eddie Van Halen and his wife. The guitarist even guested with Scandal onstage for two songs in 1984 – and you can hear it below. Then with David Lee Roth's departure the following year, Smyth suddenly found herself in the frame to replace him.  

"They were heavy drinkers. I don’t drink,"she reflected in an interview with Stereogum in 2020 on her decision to turn the band down. "I never saw myself living in LA. I was like, “I’m from New York, we don’t move to LA.”

"It’s all semantics because if [Eddie] had said to me, 'Let’s make a record', then I would have said yes to that. But joining the band — to me then, 'Oh god, they fight all the time, him and his brother [Alex Van Halen], and I don’t want to get into a volatile situation.' And I was probably heavily hormoned out because I was eight months pregnant, so there was a state of mind that I was in of how I need to take care of myself. But I regretted turning him down. For a long time I regretted it. When you start to have regrets, I was like, 'Oh man I would’ve made so much money.'

Smyth had the pipes for the job and Van Hagar detractors would obviously have been spared that whole era. But the band did very, very well with Sammy and, for her part, Smyth isn't bitter about how things turned out now. 

"I wish I had the right kind of luck," she told Stereogum. "I feel it’s just like I’m in this stream or this river and sometimes it’s just taking you where you need to go. Sometimes you’ve got to paddle and go in certain directions and other times you’re just letting it take you. And for me, like I said, my life has turned out unbelievable. That I’ve been married and with the same man for 25 years is insane."

Dimebag Darrell, Slash – Megadeth 

If you thought Anthrax's singer maneuvers were complicated, they've got nothing on the revolving door in Megadeth. Dave Mustaine has remained the band's only constant since 1983, but that revolving door nearly stopped the world hearing Pantera's classic albums.

“I actually called him up and asked him to play in Megadeth,” Mustaine told the Tampa Bay Times in 2019 of Dimebag Darrell Abbott in a recent interview. “Fate would have completely changed if I would have called him before I called [drummer] Nick Menza. I said, ‘Hey, Darrell, I’m looking for a guitar player.’ And he goes, ‘Can I bring my brother?’ And I went, ‘Who’s your brother?’ He goes, ‘Vinnie Paul! Don’t you know Vinnie Paul?"

“He wanted to bring his brother and have him play with us," Mustaine continued. "And I go, ‘Oh, man, I just hired Nick Menza.’ Can you imagine what Vinnie and Darrell would have been with me and Junior [bassist Dave Ellefson]? Would’ve been pretty cool.”

We can hear that in our minds but surely the rumor Mustaine asked Slash to join the band is nonsense? No, actually. Around the mid '80s before Guns started taking off, Slash found himself living near Mustaine in LA. 

"I crashed wherever I could, and did whatever came to mind, and there was a point in there when I hooked up with Dave Mustaine of Megadeth," Slash wrote in his 2007 autobiography.  "We became friends; he was strung out on smack and crack and he lived in the same neighborhood, so we hung out and wrote songs. He was a true, complete fucking maniac and a genius riff writer.

"We'd hang out, smoke crack, and come up with major heavy metal riffs, just f****** dark and heavy as hell. Sometimes Dave Ellefson would join us; we got along great, we wrote some great s***. It got to the point, in our drug-fueled creative zone, that we started seriously entertaining the idea of me joining Megadeth.

"Guns was in a holding pattern, after all, and I was high enough to consider all kinds of bad decisions," Slash added. "Dave Mustaine is still one of the most genius musicians I have ever jammed with, but still, in my heart of hearts, I knew I couldn't leave Guns."

Rory Gallagher – The Rolling Stones

Michael Schenker was certainly not the only number The Stones called when Mick Taylor quit the band in 1974. He left a huge guitar hole to fill, but Rory Gallagher certainly had the potential to fill it.

Rory had already found success with Taste and as a solo bluesman by that point, documented by the Irish Tour film that same year, but he couldn't resist the chance to find out more when he received a surprising phone call from the Stones' road manager and pianist at the family home in Ireland.

"It was about one o’clock the morning," Rory's brother and manager Dónal recalled to The Telegraph in 2020.  "Back then, if the call was overseas, you had to go through the operator. She told my mother she was connecting. I took the call. I was a bit defensive because, in those days, there were a lot of kidnappings [by the Provisional IRA]. The guy says, ‘My name is Ian Stewart… I’m looking for Rory Gallagher.

“Rory had gone to bed on one of his rare early nights," Dónal added. "When I woke him, he thought I was winding him up. But he agreed to go to Rotterdam to jam with them.” Jagger even collected Rory from the airport. 

"Rory did three or four nights," Dónal told Eon Music in 2020, "and I remember him telling me the first night Keith didn’t come down, so Mick said to Rory; “Can you start me up with a riff? I’ve got this song, but can you help me with a riff?”, and Rory said OK, and Jagger was just filling up with a coffee from a vending machine, and it burned him, and he said; 'Oh jeez, that’s hot stuff!' and Rory said; “Oh, is the title ‘Hot Stuff’?” and he said; “Oh yeah, that’s a great title!” So yeah, there was a lot of Rory riffs on that album that was used later on."

Despite the creative sparks, and the positive noises from Jagger, the whole thing fell apart.   

“On the final night, Keith had come down, and they had done sessions over the days, but Mick and Keith weren’t talking to each other," Dónal explained. "So Rory said, ‘Please let me know what’s going on because I’ve got to be on a plane to Tokyo tomorrow‘ [he was leaving for a Japanese tour he'd already arranged]. And Mick said, ‘Keith wants to have a good long chat with you. Please go up. He’s waiting in his suite upstairs.’ And Rory went up, and Keith was comatose in the bed”.

“Rory stayed up all night, went back every half hour, and tried talking, but [Keith] wasn’t," continued Dónal. "So Rory made up his own mind, for whatever reason, and just packed up his guitar and amp, and I met him at Heathrow with a fresh suitcase.”

Rory left a note with the band that day with details of how to contact him but the communication breakdown was never repaired. He would never play with the Stones again. Ronnie Wood would eventually get the job, and nearly 40 years on he's still there and we still can't picture the gifted Rory playing a sideman role in the Stones. "I think there was an issue that Rory should have been the man," reflected  Dónal, "but Ronnie Wood probably fits in better with the style and with the image."     

• 10 of the best songs for beginner guitar players to learn

Few bands of the early '70s created such a defiantly idiosyncratic sound as Jethro Tull. Formed in Luton in 1967 and named after an 18th century farmer/inventor, the band emerged from the late 60s British blues boom and forged a dense sonic mix which incorporated heavy rock, flute-led folk melodies, blues infused licks and surreal lyrical imagery. 

Led by enigmatic frontman Ian Anderson, the band attained massive critical and commercial success in the early 1970s with albums such as Aqualung (1971) Thick As A Brick (1972) and A Passion Play (1973).

The band started life as the Blades, an outfit formed in Blackpool, where the family of Edinburgh-born Anderson had moved in 1960. By 1967 they had moved south to Bedfordshire and in December that year Jethro Tull were formed. 

In 1968, they released debut album This Was, opened for Pink Floyd at the first free rock festival in Hyde Park and appeared on the Rolling Stones’ Rock & Roll Circus, with Tony Iommi on guitar.  He had replaced guitarist Mick Abrahams but the Black Sabbath founder lasted only a week before leaving and being replaced by Martin Barre. 

In May 1969, after touring with Hendrix and Led Zeppelin, they scored a No. 3 hit with the song Living In The Past. What set Tull apart was Anderson’s flute playing, a unique yet divisive instrument among the late '60s blues purists. 

Their folk-tinged second album Stand Up topped the UK charts and reached No. 20 in the US, catapulting them from the margins to the mainstream and opening up touring opportunities in the UK and US. By then Anderson had developed a charismatic and eccentric onstage presence, with his wild hair, frock coat and tights, enhanced by an expression of mad-eyed delirium.

But it was their fourth album Aqualung that would become their magnum opus. Released in March 1971, the album heralded a whole new sonic template for the band, introducing progressive rock themes while fusing strident hard rock passages with more ethereal folk. By then, the line-up behind Anderson was Martin Barre (guitar), John Evan (keyboards), Jeffrey Hammond (bass) and Clive Bunker (drums). 

On Aqualung chief songwriter Anderson found his lyrical voice, introducing themes that were more serious and intellectual. The album was inspired by old photos of homeless people on the Thames Embankment. The core lyrical themes of religion and alienation chimed with listeners in the UK and in the US. The album went on to sell seven million units worldwide.

The band’s fifth Thick As A Brick followed in 1972, a ‘parody’ concept album featuring just one 43-minute track, and in 1973, A Passion Play was another creative high watermark. 

On Songs From The Wood (1977) the band shifted towards folk-prog, inspired by Anderson’s move to rural Buckinghamshire. Over the following decades they continued to stretch themselves creatively – the hard rock of 1987’s Crest Of A Knave being one of the high points, but it is arguably their 70s output, most noticeably Aqualung, Thick As A Brick and A Passion Play, that yielded their most enduring sonic riches.

 1. Aqualung – Aqualung (1971)

If one song defines everything that made Jethro Tull unique, this is it. It’s a song regarded by many as their masterpiece, the title track of an album inspired by old photos of homeless people on London’s Thames Embankment. Imagined stories of these transient characters from society’s margins inspired a rich vein of songwriting in Anderson. 

Lyrically, it’s both literal and melodramatic. ‘Snot's running down his nose / Greasy fingers, smearing shabby clothes…  Feeling like a dead duck / Spitting out pieces of his broken luck.”

The track meanders between hard and soft passages but is anchored by a staggered, overdriven guitar riff, written by Anderson on an acoustic and then shown to guitarist Martin Barre.  

"I wrote the main riff in a hotel room in New York City,” Anderson told Guitar World magazine in 2013. “At the time I was trying to write songs that had [single-note] lines that would translate on the electric.”

Barre’s choice of gear on this album was heavily influenced by Leslie West of Mountain, who Tull had toured with in the US. “I thought his tone was tremendous, so I bought a Les Paul Junior,” Barre told Vintage Guitar magazine in October 1997. “That was the only guitar I used on the Aqualung album. I didn’t use any effects; I plugged straight into the Hiwatt. The reverb or any other sounds were studio rack effects.”

In a 2015 interview with Classic Rock, Barre recalled recording the solo to this song, when Jimmy Page walked into the studio. 

“He walked into the control room to say hello, just as I was recording the solo to Aqualung. Now, in those days, if you didn't get a guitar solo in one or two takes, it might become a flute solo. It was, 'Go in there and do it or else'. And here was Jimmy waving like mad – 'Hey, Martin!' – and I'm thinking, 'I can't wave back, or I'm going to blow the solo'.

2. Thick As A Brick (Side 1) – Thick As A Brick (1971)

Ian Anderson was not happy with critics hailing Aqualung as a concept album and so allegedly conceived Thick As A Brick as a parody of a concept album. The original packaging was designed as a 12-page newspaper, with Anderson using surreal Monty Python-style humour to poke fun at the band, the fans and the music critics. As he described it, the plan was to "come up with something that really is the mother of all concept albums".

The album has just one long track, split over two sides. In some ways, the plan backfired, because what Anderson came up with, certainly across the hugely engaging 22 minutes 39 seconds of side one, is a flawless slice of progressive rock. Or as Classic Rock put it “such a brilliant piece of music that it stands almost in a category all by itself”.

Apart from drummer Clive Bunker, who left and was replaced by Barriemore Barlow, this is the same line-up as Aqualung, and the playing is exemplary – adventurous, assured and nimble. 

English folk influences pervade across this piece, interspersed with full-on breakneck prog – complex stabs, time signatures, arpeggios and phrasings with organ, bass and flute in particular providing soaring, virtuoso performances. Lyrically, the whole work hinges on the notion that an eight-year-old boy, the fictitious Gerald Bostock, had written all the lyrics for the album.  

“I have to admit that I really imposed the whole idea on the other guys,” Anderson told Classic Rock. “But, for whatever reason they went along with it, and actually warmed to the task once we got stuck into the music.”

 3. Locomotive Breath – Aqualung (1971)

Another masterpiece from the Aqualung album and a track which has served as the band’s encore since 1972. “Despite the title, it’s actually about the problems of population explosion and the demands society puts on us as a consequence,” recalled Anderson in 2020. "We’re on a train heading in the future, whatever that might lead, and we cannot get off. The song is meant to be a bit scary and threatening.

“I keep being drawn back to the subject [of trains], because public transport is part of my life. I don’t drive, so rely on buses, trains and the like. But here it is about a serious social issue.”

The track intros with John Evans’ bluesy piano, before lurching into bombastic hard rock. “In the shuffling madness,” begins Anderson, “Of the locomotive breath / Runs the all-time loser / Headlong to his death”.

Unusually for the time, the song was pieced together from overdubs, because as Anderson put it “Locomotive Breath was actually an utter failure when we tried to play it all together. It didn't gel. We didn't get the groove.”

4. Songs From The Wood  – Songs From The Wood  (1977)

Jethro Tull fans were dealt a stylistic curveball on their tenth album, Songs From The Wood, which veered away from the dense prog leanings and immersed itself in pastoral folk-rock with tinges of classical. This title track opens with close vocal harmonies and Anderson’s vocal timbre fits seamlessly within the folkier style.

The prog time signatures and complex stops and starts are still there but the hard rock is absent and there’s a warm grandeur. By 1977, Anderson had bought a farm estate in rural Buckinghamshire, which prompted his pursuit of a folkier, more organic sound.

Lyrically, the album was filled with medieval imagery and there’s a poetic feel throughout. “Let me bring you all things refined / Galliards and lute songs served in chilling ale / Greeting well-met fellow, hail / I am the wind to fill your sail.”

5.  A New Day Yesterday – Stand Up (1969)

Guitarist Martin Barre replaced founding member Mick Abrahams on Tull’s second album and it’s the former’s explosive riffing that dominates this opening track. It’s a stunning piece of music, blending classical, blues, jazz, and psychedelia into a strident, new ‘progressive’ rock sound. 

The production is spacious, with fluid bass and big ambient drums. Raunchy harmonica reflects the band’s blues roots and Barre’s powerful stabs and squalls weave within the whole. At its core, this is heavy blues, primitive and compelling. At 1:47, Barre lurches into a growling solo before Anderson picks it up on Hammond organ and flute at 2:10. 

Opinions differ on what guitar Barre used on the Stand Up album. As he explained to Guitarist magazine, he used a Gibson 330 for his first audition, and due to feedback issues with the hollow body he bought  Gibson SG Special for the next year before he bought the Les Paul Junior.

He complimented his sound with one particular effect. “In the very early days, I used Hiwatt and they didn’t drive very readily and so I had this horrible treble booster," Barre told Guitarist in 2015. "It pushed things at the front end but unfortunately, it was very, very prone to picking up radio stations, particularly in America. It was a nightmare. Sometimes the radio signal was louder than the guitar! 

“When I started using Marshall amps, I found that I could ditch the treble boosters but I think it put me off for life, really. I thought all those things are more trouble than they’re worth."

As if there was any doubt, Shane Hawkins cemented his future as a drummer via his triumphant appearance at last year’s Taylor Hawkins Tribute Concerts, providing a hard-hitting, powerful foundation for Foo Fighters on My Hero in honour of his late father.

While some corners of the internet had Shane tipped to succeed his dad in the Biggest Rock Band in The World, the reality of a teenager joining a band with a combined age of well over two-and-a-half centuries never seemed wholly likely. However, what was made clear is that Shane Hawkins is one hell of a drummer.

The stage might have been smaller for his latest live show, but this past weekend Shane delivered even more proof that he’s inherited the knack for the family trade by sitting in with Chevy Metal - the classic rock covers band founded by Taylor Hawkins as a side project.

Shane joined Chevy Metal for their show at the Canyon Club, Agoura Hills, California, on 29 July, raising money for the Rock & Roll Rescue dog shelter/adoption service. 

Sat behind a mix-and-match kit featuring drums seen in Hawkins’ social media clips, he echoed his father’s drum setup, with his cymbals set just high enough to reach, and auxiliary toms placed above the hi-hat.

Among the covers were Black Sabbath’s The Wizard, and Led Zeppelin, Moby Dick. The latter giving Shane the chance to flex with an impressive drum solo channelling both John Bonham and some heavy inspiration from Taylor Hawkins’ own solos in Foo Fighters.

Skid Row frontman, Sebastian Bach provided lead vocals for run-throughs of Van Halen’s version of The Kinks’ classic, You Really Got Me and Mötley Crüe, Looks That Kill. Meanwhile, the band backed Elliot Easton for two songs by The Cars - Just What I Needed and Good Times Roll. 

In addition to Shane Hawkins, Chevy Metal were also joined by three other drummers for the set: session ace, Kenny Aronoff, Poison’s Rikki Rockett and Foo Fighters engineer, John Lousteau.

Black Sabbath have just released a newly restored 40th anniversary edition of their first ever live album, Live Evil, the centrepiece of which is a triumphant performance of Heaven And Hell that closes out with Tony Iommi leaving footprints all over his wah pedal, and scorch marks on the first three rows as he cuts loose on a guitar solo.

Iommi might be a man who will forever be defined as metal guitar’s original riff lord, but this freatkout is a reminder that Iommi could cut heads with the best of them, and that the Ronnie James Dio era gave us some of Sabbath’s strongest moments as the band rebounded from the the departure of Ozzy Osbourne.

Iommi was a guest on Eddie Trunk’s Siriux XM radio show recently and was reflecting upon the era, and was asked if he was conscious of the shifts in guitar that were under way. This was the dawn of the ‘80s. Eddie Van Halen had already changed rock guitar, jimmying open Pandora’s Box with all-new techniques that inspired an arms race for six-string oneupmanship. 

California was a hot-bed of innovation in guitar gear, and the practice of playing it, but Iommi told Trunk he was already in his zone, explaining that he had made his bones in the ‘70s, and as such he had been overplaying long before anyone else showed him how. 

“Since the ‘70s, I’d always played a solo. I mean, yes, I got carried away a bit too long sometimes,” he said. “Listening back to things, you think, ’Bloody hell! That was a bit over the top. Too long.’ But you just sort of get taken over with it, and it doesn’t seem as long as it is. And we had done it from the ‘70s. It was the thing. Everybody done guitar solos and drum solos in the ‘70s. That was what we did, and just never changed. We went on and on and on, and always done that.”

With the late, great Ronnie James Dio on the mic, Black Sabbath had a new energy, and Iommi had a willing accomplice. When it came to guitar solos, Iommi says Dio was an enabler. The story had always been that there were creative tensions by the time Live Evil was recorded and released, that Dio was exerting too much control. But Iommi spoke fondly of that time, telling Trunk that Dio’s presence allowed them to be play around with the set and the arrangements. And yes, to play more solos.

“We’d come off and I would say to Ronnie – and not just for the sake of it – ‘Oh, you sounded great!’ And he said the same. We would all encourage each other, and that was a major part of it, to push each other,” said Iommi. “Ronnie, he’d sort of say, ‘Play a longer solo. Play this.’ It was good to hear that instead of, ‘Oh, don’t play a solo!’ It was good to be encouraged that way, and we would do that with each other.”

Live Evil included the extended version of Heaven And Hell, with Iommi’s solo, and the band reprised the track during The Sign Of The Southern Cross. It wasn’t just Dio’s presence that had changed Sabbath’s sound. 

Bill Ward was gone, replaced by a coltish Vinny Appice whose raw power drove the band on. “He was just perfect for that lineup,” said Iommi. Appice duly took his share of the spotlight in a thumping solo during War Pigs. Dio was all in for mixing up the set.

“It was really good with Ron. It would encourage us to try different things, which was really good, and we would be able to do that,” said Iommi. “We would actually be able to pull songs out of the hat and do them. Ronnie was capable of doing all that catalogue, and that was a great thing. 

“And we could fiddle around with them and put a bit of another song in, teasers coming in and out, a bit of thought into the stage set. And Ronnie was always involved in it and it was really a good band, a tight band. We got really tight.”

Black Sabbath’s Live Evil 40th Anniversary Super Deluxe edition is out now via Rhino/Warner. If you are in the US or Canada you can follow Eddie Trunk’s show at SiriusXM, or catch the full interview with Tony Iommi above or wherever you get your podcasts.

This is a bit of a strange one – Google 'Black Sabbath Nuit Noire' and little to no info comes up, and yet a live album with that title has surfaced on Spotify and YouTube.

It seems to be an official release – Sabbath's YouTube has posted songs from it – and we know it's 1970 Paranoid-era because the songs are all taken from that album and their self-titled debut. A nine-song tour de force including War Pigs, Iron Man, NIB and Paranoid. There are no listings for a physical release that we can find.  

The track order doesn't match any of the previously released 1970 live albums we can find either – like Live At Fillmore West, Paris (shown below)  and Montreux.

It's unexpected but most welcome – and it sounds great. We're going to enjoy it! 

We've contacted Black Sabbath's representatives for further confirmation and will update you as soon as we have it. In the meantime, you can check the album out below.