Black Sabbath founder Tony Iommi says he is disappointed Black Sabbath’s original drummer Bill Ward didn’t reunite with the band but he also says it isn’t the first time Bill has done a runner.
Tony Iommi, Black Sabbath, Photo By Ros O'Gorman
“It’s been a on-off thing with Bill for many years with me,” Tony tells Noise11. “It was disappointing. We were all disappointed in it. It happened before with Heaven & Hell. We wanted Bill to come in and Bill wanted to do it again. We got him in and he left again. We were used to it really. It’s a shame. We would have liked Bill to be on the album and I’m sure Bill would have liked to have been on it but it just got to a silly situation. It just didn’t happen”.
Iommi is the only founding member of Black Sabbath to have never left the band. “It was just that I never left. I carried on,” he said. “What do you do? You try and make the best of what you can. I enjoyed some of what we done. We did some really good stuff. With Dio I thought ‘Heaven & Hell’, ‘Mob Rules’, they were good albums. ‘Dehumaniser’ and stuff. Also some of the stuff with Tony Martin and Cozy I liked”.
“When people aren’t there you try and replace it and its really difficult to replace original members because that’s the sound you have, you all create,” he says.
On some albums Tony was the only original member of Black Sabbath. “I’ve done quite a few albums with Tony Martin, Cozy Powell, Tony Murray. We’d done ‘Headless Cross’ and the ‘Forbidden’ album, which was the last one we’d done with that line-up. I didn’t really like that album”.
Tony did try to remove himself from Black Sabbath once. He recorded ‘Seventh Star’ as a solo album but the label decided to release it as a Black Sabbath record. “Yeah, I wanted it to be a solo album. I didn’t want it to be under Black Sabbath. The situation at that time, the record company wanted a Black Sabbath album. They took that. It had gone to a stage where they didn’t have anything so that was it”.
Black Sabbath will release ‘13’ in June.
Watch the complete Noise11 interview with Tony Iommi here.
