Iron Man (36 page)

‘Oh? You want to do it with us then?'

‘Oh, yeah!'

Blimey.

He said: ‘What do you want me to do? Meet you there?'

He didn't know any of the songs with Tony Martin, so I said: ‘No. You've got to come to England and rehearse.'

‘Oh, all right then.'

He came over, we rehearsed and he was great on the old Sabbath stuff, but he struggled a bit on newer songs like ‘Headless Cross'.

It was Geezer, me and Bill, so we had almost the old line-up, plus Tony Martin. Off we went to South America, with Kiss and Slayer on the bill, as well as a few others. We got on stage in front of something like 100,000 people and the pressure was on; we got by but in the end dropped the newer material. In order to keep going we ended up only doing songs like ‘Iron Man' and ‘War Pigs', the stuff Bill knew. But fair dues to Tony, he sang those old songs great.

After the tour ended, Geezer went back to Ozzy. Things needed to change. I said: ‘That's it! I'm getting Neil and Cozy back!' Within five minutes we were back together again. There might have been some hard feelings because of how things had worked out in the past, but we resolved that. We got back together and started work on the
Forbidden
album.

The record company suggested we should use a more hip producer. They were going on about the guy who produced Ice T, the guitar player in his band, Body Count, Ernie Cunnigan, better known as Ernie C. They said it would give us a bit more street cred, because they thought we'd lost that. You know what it's like: you get these whiz-kids at the company who come up with these great brainwaves that don't work. And that was one of them, but I half-heartedly went along with it. Cozy wasn't mad on the idea either and now I can see why. The production was dreadful. Here I was working with someone from a hip hop background. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but I just wasn't familiar with it and it opened up a whole new can of worms for me.

The first thing Ernie C did was to get Cozy to play this ta-ta-ta-ta bass drum stuff. It's a different style of playing altogether that these hip hop guys do as opposed to what we do, and it caused all sorts of ruckuses. Cozy was a respected drummer in his own field, and here was somebody coming along, going: ‘Play this.'

It really offended him. And the more Cozy tried, the more he
got pissed off because he didn't want to play it. It made it very difficult for everybody, because we all felt that bad vibe. To make things worse, all this was coming from a producer who didn't know anything about us. Ernie claimed he did, but it was a total shambles. The sound wasn't very good on anything and I wasn't happy at all with that album. None of us was.

I thought, well, maybe it's me that's wrong. Maybe they can do a better job than us. So we gave them the benefit of the doubt and just kept out of it. Also, if we'd have started throwing our oar in, saying, ‘We want that to sound like this', we would've been back to where we started again. What would have been the point of having somebody come in then?

Since the days of Rodger Bain I've always been involved in the production and the mixing somewhere along the line, but not at all with this album. If it had gone down a storm I would really have been worried: blimey, it must have been me all along!

It was a bad experience from start to finish.
Forbidden
was released in June 1995. I thought it was crap, even down to the cartoon cover art, so it didn't surprise me that it didn't sell. However, we did tour with it. We started the Forbidden tour off with two big festival gigs in Sweden and Denmark and then went to the States, again with Motörhead supporting us. Cozy and me got up to a lot of silly pranks; he was as bad as me. Setting people's beds up and taking the legs off things and removing the TV from the hotel room and throwing it out of the window – it was back to the old days again. I got one of those blow-up dolls and I put clothes on it and I hung it from the balcony of our hotel in Los Angeles. People were looking up and we were screaming and shouting, pretending there was an argument going on. More and more people were looking up and then I threw the doll off the balcony. Mad it was.

I've always been one for playing jokes on people in every line-up of Black Sabbath, but, of course, they got back at me as well.
In the early days I was once taking a shower when there was a knock on the hotel room door. I opened it and it was Ozzy with a full bucket of water. As I put my head out, he threw the water over me, dropped the bucket and ran. I started after him, but I had no clothes on and the door shut behind me. I thought, ah, for Christ's sake!

I knocked on the other guys' doors because I wanted to phone down to reception to get help, but of course they wouldn't let me in. I stood there in the hallway naked and, ding!, the lift door opened and all these people came out. They were all dressed up from their night out and there was me with no clothes on at all. We all stood there, staring at each other, not knowing what to do. They must have thought I was a right pervert. Eventually security came up, because someone had phoned down saying: ‘There's a naked man running around in the hallway!'

I had to explain what had happened and they let me in my room again. The guys got me good that time.

My most embarrassing moment was when we came back from America after a big tour. We got to Heathrow and one of the guys said to me: ‘I can't get all my suitcases on the trolley. You couldn't put one on your trolley, could you?'

I said: ‘Sure.'

And so I did. We went through ‘nothing to declare', and of course they stopped me.

‘Excuse me, sir, are these your suitcases?'

‘Yes.'

‘Can we look in them?'

‘Go ahead.'

They opened my suitcases and they were fine. Then they got to this other case and opened that up. I could've dropped dead on the spot, because this suitcase was full of sex toys. There were blow-up dolls, dildos, handcuffs, all the paraphernalia. I couldn't believe it and didn't know what to say. There was a queue behind
me, other people waiting to have their suitcases searched. They were pulling all this stuff out and I heard all this giggling going on behind me. I was so embarrassed, especially because they knew who I was. And, of course, I couldn't suddenly go: ‘It's not my suitcase.'

They really set me up and I have to say it was a great one. Of course, after I'd gone through customs there they all were, in stitches. They thought it was hilarious. That's what happens when you play jokes on people. They get you back!

We finished in the first week of August with three dates in California, carefully avoiding the city of Modesto. They were Cozy's last gigs with us. I had seen it coming as the tour progressed. He wasn't happy at all, because the situation had changed. He wasn't involved as much in the writing as before; it was down to me again. He wasn't the co-captain of the ship any more either and he didn't feel at all comfortable with that. And bloody Ernie C telling him what to play obviously turned the tables on him. So he decided to quit the band and left.

Bobby Rondinelli came back and off we went again, on a tour that was scheduled to go on until well into December. But my arm was going numb. It started to get really bad in America, so I went to a doctor there who also happened to be a surgeon. He said: ‘Your problem is in your neck and it's really dangerous. You need it operated on as soon as you can. And it just so happens I can do the operation tomorrow.'

I went: ‘Hang on. No!'

I thought, Christ, I've got to get home to England and get it properly seen to. I flew home and went to see two specialists. They said: ‘No, the problem is in there, in your wrist.'

Thank God I didn't go with this bloke in America, or I would've had an operation on my neck. I had a carpal tunnel operation instead. They cut into my inside arm, just above the wrist, and it's almost like a plastic band that goes around there. I was
awake while they operated on me and I could actually hear it go ‘crack!'. It made me feel sick because I could hear the noise and it felt all cold as the blood came out. Here I was, getting nauseous, and the two surgeons were merrily talking away: ‘Oh, did you see that thing on TV the other day . . .'

They were trying to involve me in the conversation as well, going: ‘Oh, look how lovely this is cut away', but there was no way I could look at it. Bloody hell, I was doing my utmost not to vomit while I was being operated on.

Then they stitched it up and that was it. After a while I could play again. It cured it and I was never bothered by that again. Nowadays it's everything else that's playing up!

Carpal tunnel did cut the Forbidden tour short, as we had to cancel a couple of weeks' worth of dates. Just as well, really. I financed the tour and paying for the bus, the crew, the hotels, the musicians, this and that, and it was actually costing me money to go out and play. We just couldn't keep on doing that.

I was sitting back home with my arm all bandaged up. When the tour stopped the band broke up and it would be many years before I'd see Tony Martin again. And I had no idea that
Forbidden
was Black Sabbath's last studio album ever. Or at least for a very, very long time.

After the
Forbidden
album the deal with I.R.S. Records expired and to all intents and purposes Black Sabbath was on hold. I talked to Phil Banfield and Ralph Baker about working with a singer when I heard Glenn Hughes was coming to England. He came over to see me, and we started writing songs really quickly. He was singing and playing bass. It was only a bit of fun really; what we did wasn't intended to be released. It was just something to see what we could do. Also I needed to work because at that point I wasn't doing a fat lot. I needed to keep myself going.

Glenn suggested getting Dave Holland, who, years ago, was the drummer with Judas Priest. Dave came over and played a bit on this electric kit. We put some ideas down and we went into UB40's studio, called DEP, so that we could demo the stuff properly, with Dave playing a real kit. We recorded all the songs and then left them because I went to do the first Black Sabbath reunion tour with Ozzy, after which I started to work on my solo album, which went in a different direction altogether. That's why these DEP sessions just got lost, forgotten about.

After a while these things came out as a bootleg. I thought, how did they get it? I asked Glenn and he said: ‘I don't know.' There
were only so many people who had access to the tapes. It could've been somebody at the studio, someone to do with Glenn or Dave Holland, or someone to do with me. We never did find out.

Some time at the beginning of 2004 my guitar tech, Mike Clement, was at my studio at home transferring boxes of cassettes of riffs on to CDs. He came across a couple of the tracks from the DEP sessions and said: ‘Why don't you put them out, they're really good!'

These tracks coming out on bootlegs was a real pain anyway, so I said to Ralph Baker: ‘We've got to do something about this. Maybe we should mix this album and finish it and put it out ourselves. Just to kill the bootleg stuff, really.'

We remixed the tracks, I added a couple of guitar bits and changed a couple of things. And I had to put a new drummer on because, in the meantime, Dave Holland had been done for molesting young kids. I was terribly shocked when I heard about that. I couldn't believe it. I was watching the news one morning, and they went: ‘Dave Holland, Judas Priest . . .'

You could have knocked me over with a feather; I had no idea he was like that at all. I remember Dave playing on one of the DEP sessions one day and he brought this young lad. I never thought anything of it. He said: ‘This is so-and-so, I'm teaching him to play drums, he's a student of mine.'

‘Right, hello.'

He was probably about eleven or twelve years old or so, maybe a bit older. But when I found out about all that, blimey. He was sentenced to seven or eight years in prison. We thought, we can't release these with Dave on them! So I took his drum parts off. We brought in Jimmy Copley, a really good player who I knew from Paul Rodgers's solo stuff, and he did all the drums at my house. Because there were no click tracks on the tapes, he basically had to play to Dave Holland's tracks. It was a bit awkward, but Jimmy did a real good job.

They were just demos, we didn't go into the sounds and stuff, they weren't intended for release. But when the album,
The 1996 DEP Sessions
, was released in September 2004 it was received very well. And after all those years, it finally killed the bootlegs.

I met my third wife, Valery, when I was in London recording
The Eternal Idol
. I went out to a club called Tramp one night and I met Val down there. She was a model and a dancer. She danced in one of these variety-type shows, where they would have a dancing team with ten women and a bloke, like a musical. And as a model she did advertisements for face cream and hand cream.

We swapped numbers. She called me up and we started seeing each other. I didn't really want to get involved, because at the time I was too interested in doing more drugs, but eventually we did get a relationship going. We were together for six years and then we got married.

Our wedding was an extremely quick affair. I tried to do it all quietly, but Phil Banfield knew about it and he wanted to be best man. We just got married at this register office with Phil as my witness. We went back home and all my friends were there.

Blimey, what happened here? It's supposed to be a secret!