Black Sabbathin Tony Iommi: ”Alkuaikoina konserttimme houkuttelivat noitia”
Legendaarisen Black Sabbathin kitaristi Tony Iommi antoi hiljattain haastattelun The Guardian -lehdelle. Yhtye on parhaillaan viimeisellä maailmankiertueellaan, ja viimeisen Suomen keikkansa se soittaa heinäkuun 7. päivä Helsingissä Kaisaniemen puistossa. Iommi kertoo voinnistaan seuraavaa:
”I’m OK at the moment, dare I say it. It’s stage three lymphoma, so it could come back at any time. That’s one of the reasons why we’re stopping touring. It’s not the playing – it’s the long flights and arriving at a hotel at 4am. That’s not good for me because it affects the blood cells. But I love playing with the band, and it’s sad to think this is the last tour.”
Siitä, miltä tuntuu soittaa viimeistä kertaa kyseisissä maissa hän kertoi:
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”It particularly hit me in Australia. I thought: ’Blimey. This is it. We’re never going back.’ It’s very emotional. But it doesn’t mean we won’t play together any more,we’re just stopping touring. Well, I’m not doing any more. They [Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler] might be (laughs).”
Heavy metalin syntyyn johtaneesta työtapaturmastaan hän kertoo seuraavaa:
”It was my last day at work. I was about to join this professional band and go to Germany. I came home for lunch and didn’t want to go back. My mum said: ’Go finish the job properly.’ The machine came down on my fingers and took the ends off. But it made me determined. I melted a Fairy Liquid bottle and made new tips for my fingers, then detuned the strings to make them easier to play. I found my sound because of Fairy Liquid.”
Artikkeli jatkuu mainoksen jälkeenMainos päättyy
Hän kommentoi myös sitä, että Black Sabbathin luultiin aluksi olevan satanistinen yhtye:
”We did have an interest in the occult. Well, Geezer and myself watched horror films, but we’d get witches at the shows. One night we got back to the hotel and there was a whole row of them in black cloaks, sitting on the floor, chanting. We had to step over them to get in our rooms. In the end we blew their candles out and sang ’Happy Birthday’ to them. That really pissed them off.”
Iommi tunnetaan myös kepposistaan. Tapauksesta, jossa yhtye räjäytti liikemies-seikkailija Richard Bransonin kaikki järvessä olevat kalat, hän kertoo seuraavaa:
”We were staying at his house to do an album. Ian Gillan from Deep Purple was our singer at the time, but he erected a marquee outside to sleep. Ian said: ’I want the fresh air for my voice’ and all that rubbish. Anyway, when we came back from the pub, we put all this pyro round his tent. It was so loud that his marquee just took off, with a mushroom cloud like an atomic bomb. The blast went right through the lake and all these prize fish came floating to the top. We were thinking: ’Blimey, who’s gonna tell Branson?’ Of course there was a church next door and they got a petition against us.”
Artikkeli jatkuu mainoksen jälkeenMainos päättyy
Alkuperäisen rumpali Bill Wardin kullan väriseksi maalaamsesta hän kertoo:
”We were staying at John DuPont’s house in Los Angeles, the bloke who owned DuPont paint products. We found all this paint in the garage, and were all pissed, so thought it would be fun to paint Bill gold from head to toe. He started having convulsions. The ambulance people gave us a right bollocking: ’You idiots! You could have killed him.’ They gave him adrenalin and we had to use paint stripper to get it off. He looked like a beetroot by the end.”
Entisen jalkapallopelaaja ja -manageri Trevor Francisin Lamb Of Godin konserttiin lähettämistä hän kommentoi:
”He came to see us in Manchester and they were supporting. I said ’Oh, you’ll like this band, Trevor, they’re like the Eagles.’ He came back like he was in shock. His face was a picture.”
Artikkeli jatkuu mainoksen jälkeenMainos päättyy
Iommi kertoo myös siitä, että Black Sabbath harkitsi yhdysvaltalaista pop-rock-laulaja Michael Boltonia laulajakseen:
”When we were looking for a vocalist after Ronnie – or maybe after Ian Gillan. We had thousands of tapes sent in and Michael Bolton was one of them, before he was famous. He was good, to be honest, but we had so many it got confusing.”
Mies kommentoi myös Ozzy Osbournen ainutlaatuisuutta ja tapausta, jossa sytytti Bill Wardin tuleen:
”He’s the original. It’s like putting an old glove on, with Ozzy and Geezer. It’s a shame Bill’s not involved now. It was contractual, partly, but we were worried about his health after his heart thing. I still speak to him but we tend to email. I can’t paint him gold by email. We had some great fun. I used to set him on fire.”
Artikkeli jatkuu mainoksen jälkeen”It was our party piece, which always worked until the last time we did it. We had this new producer, Martin Birch, who’d heard all these stories about satanism and was a bit nervous. I made a wooden doll and wrapped it in a black cloth and the other guys wound him up that it was my voodoo doll of him. Anyway, Bill says – in front of Martin – ’Are you going to set fire to me then, Tony?’ I tipped rubbing alcohol over him. Normally it just burned off but this time it soaked into his clothes, so when I lit it he went up like a bomb. He was rolling on the floor, shouting and screaming. I thought it was part of the joke, so poured more stuff on him. Martin couldn’t believe it. We had to get an ambulance for Bill. He’d got third-degree burns. I felt bloody awful. We still play jokes on each other. Not quite as severe as that. I learned my lesson.”
Lisäksi hän ihmettelee Osbournesta hiljattain kirjoitettuja juorujuttuja:
”It’s nonsense, to be honest. You never know what’s coming. God knows what I’ll read about him next – probably that he’s pregnant.”
Viime vuoden Euroviisuihihin Armenialle kirjoittamastaan kappaleesta hän kertoo:
”I’ve done a lot for Armenia, after various earthquake disasters, so they asked me and I had this ballad. It was the last thing I thought I should be doing (laughs). I mean, I never watch Eurovision. Of course, I had to watch it then.”
Black Sabbathin viimeiseksi kokpitkäksi julkaisuksi jääneen ”13”-nimisen albumin menestystä Iommi kommentoi seuraavasti:
”Our first number one, after 40-odd years. Absolutely brilliant. And playing live now is nervy, daring … you’re on edge, because you never know if it’s going to go crap. But when the crowd are with you, it’s phenomenal. Then you come off the road and you’re you again.”
Koko haastattelun voit lukea täältä.