Iron Man (28 page)

He drove up and down the river to see whether it had drifted off or if somebody had stolen it. He couldn't find it and went completely potty. He reported his boat missing, but then found out that it was in the river, underwater. He had these two gigantic
new engines on them and they were ruined. So Bill got his own back.

Ian had walked away from Bill's crashed car unscathed, but he did injure himself when he tried to get into my room through the window. He climbed up a ladder, stepped over the window sill, got his foot stuck in the radiator, fell into the room and twisted his ankle. All because he wanted to put a fish under my bed.

Absolutely mad.

Richard Branson came to stay for a few days and him and Ian were smoking these huge joints. A right one he was. Don Arden and his son, David, came to see us at The Manor as well. To welcome them properly we put some bombs on the entrance gate. As Don and David drove in the bombs went up: Boom!

It was an unusual match, that line-up, but we did have a lot of laughs.We produced the album ourselves. Ian had nodules on his vocal cords at the time. When we first met him, he said: ‘I'm not going to be able to sing too much because I have a problem with my voice.'

‘Oh?'

But we put down the songs without too many hitches. Ian's lyrics were about sexual things or true facts, even about stuff that happened at The Manor there and then. They were good, but quite a departure from Geezer's and Ronnie's lyrics. There was a brick building at the back of The Manor, and it was close to a church. I had some gear set up in there because I wanted to try to get another guitar sound. The noise was deafening and all the locals complained. They drew up a petition against us and the priest brought it around. And that's why one of the tracks from the album is called ‘Disturbing The Priest'. It's a good example of how Ian wrote about real events.

In those days you had to make your own effects. Bill made this particular ‘tingngng!' sound on ‘Disturbing The Priest'. He got this by hitting an anvil and then dipping it into a bathtub full of
water, so the ‘tingngng!' sound slowly changed and faded away. It took us all day to do that, because trying to lower the anvil gradually into the water was a nightmare. It took two people on one end and two more on the other to lower it, with somebody else hitting it. It was so heavy that we couldn't speak or anything, just sort of nod to each other. It was a sight to see: if somebody had made a film of it, it would have looked absolutely ridiculous. But it worked. All this to create this one ‘tingngng!', which nowadays you can get from a computer in seconds.

I thought ‘Zero The Hero' was a good track, and apparently I'm not the only one who likes it. When I heard ‘Paradise City' by Guns N' Roses I thought, fucking hell, that sounds like one of ours! Somebody also suggested that the Beastie Boys might have borrowed the riff for ‘(You Gotta) Fight For Your Right (To Party!)' from our song ‘Hot Line'. If it's true let's sue them. We won't play any more; we'll just make money from lawsuits! But needless to say we didn't sue! ‘Keep It Warm' was a riff that I'd had floating about since
Mob Rules
and I thought it was about time we used it. I have a habit of keeping my riffs; I've got thousands of them. You know a riff is good when you play it and it gets to you. You just feel a good riff. The one that might be the beginning of a new song is the one that jumps out and you think, that's it, I like that! I found that while I'm still able to keep writing them, I usually don't go back to the old ones, so I'm only getting more and more. Maybe I should sell riffs!

When it came to doing the mix, Ian played the stuff back really fucking loud. Supposedly he blew a couple of tweeters in the studio speakers this way. We did the mix not knowing that they had gone, and nobody noticed. We just thought it was a bit of a funny sound, but it went very wrong somewhere between the mix and the mastering and pressing of that album. We didn't follow that through, and apparently when they tested the lacquers the sound was really dull and muffly. I didn't know about it, because
we were already out on tour in Europe. By the time we heard the album, it was out and in the charts, but the sound was awful. It sold really well, but we were very disappointed that it hadn't come out as we all wanted it to. The original tapes sounded so much better.

Born Again
was very different from anything we'd done before. Lyrically, because Ian's points of view on things were different from those of Ronnie and Geezer. And sound-wise, because that got all pear-shaped somewhere along the line. But there're some very good, heavy tracks on it. The cover was another matter. Ian couldn't believe it when he saw it. He went: ‘You can't do that. You can't have a baby on the front with claws and horns!'

He absolutely detested it. Somebody had presented this thing to Don Arden: ‘I've got this idea for you . . .'

And Don went: ‘That's great!'

He really pushed it on us: ‘I think it will cause a lot of problems, a lot of interest, people will talk about it!'

People talked about it all right.

I was in stitches when I first saw it, but then we ended up actually having it.

‘Who would have that?'

‘We would!'

During the recording Bill had some problem with his ex-wife. I think it had something to do with getting custody of his son. One day I bought Bill a plaque, because he'd been a year off alcohol. I went to give it to him and he was pissed as a parrot. It was such a downer, because it was all going so well and then, bang!, off the wagon and depressed again. I said to Geezer: ‘What's happened? What's going on?'

He said: ‘Oh, he's had some bad news from LA.'

The sponsor from AA had gone by that point. We caught him stealing stuff off Bill, so we sent him packing. We tried to bring Bill around, but he went through a weird stage. Over the next few
days he sat in the kitchen at The Manor. This lovely old house had all these original leaded windows and in a fit of rage Bill threw all these plates and crockery and everything through them. We had people come over to redo them all, put in other windows and lead them, and, would you believe it, the next day Bill did the same again. He was just really angry about it all and he wanted to go back to LA, to get himself into recovery again.

It was real disappointing for us. He had recorded the album, but . . . now what?

We wondered who we should get to replace Bill. I called Bev Bevan, who played with The Move and ELO, to see if he'd come along for a while. Bev was an old mate. He said to me: ‘I don't know whether I can play it.'

I said: ‘Come and have a go.'

We rehearsed, he got used to the songs and he played better and better as it went on, and in the end he toured with us for as long as this line-up lasted. It was nice to have another old friend on tour. At first we didn't even know how long Bev was going to be needed. We thought Bill would come back, but he just wasn't capable.

When we were thinking about the stage set for our Born Again tour, Geezer said: ‘Why don't we have something that looks like Stonehenge, you know, with stones and all that stuff?'

‘Hmm, that's a good idea.'

Geezer jotted down what it should look like and gave it to the designers. Two or three months later we saw it. We rehearsed for the tour at the Birmingham NEC and we said: ‘Oh great, the stage set is going to come today!'

It came in and we couldn't believe it. It was as big as the real
Stonehenge. They had taken Geezer's measurements the wrong way and thought it was meant to be life-size. I said: ‘How the bloody hell did that happen?'

‘Well, I put down the height in centimetres, but they must have thought it was in inches.'

We were in shock. This stuff was coming in and in and in. It had all these huge columns in the back that were as wide as your average bedroom, the columns in the front were about 13 feet high, and we had all the monitors and the side fills as well as all this rock. It was made of fibreglass and wood, and bloody heavy.

The tour continued throughout Europe. I suggested we play ‘Smoke On The Water', because Ian was known for it and it seemed like a bum deal for him not to do any of his stuff while he was doing all of ours. I don't know whether we played it properly, but the audience loved it. The critics moaned; it was something out of the bag and they didn't want to know then.

Ian had all the lyrics written out as he had a hard time remembering them. He got to a point where he had them all over the stage. One time during ‘Black Sabbath' they blew too much dry ice our way. Ian was standing there with his head down, hair in front of his face, huffing and puffing, furiously trying to blow the dry ice away from his lyric sheets.

I went: ‘You can't have all those lyrics lying around, it looks a bit obvious.'

He said: ‘I've nearly got them. I'll have them soon!'

But he never did, he just couldn't remember them. Ian wasn't very sure-footed either. He once fell over my pedal board. He was waving at the people, stepped back and, bang!, he went arse over head big time. He jumped up and tried to make believe it was part of the show. Ian was very funny. As a matter of fact, off stage Ian was a bloody lunatic. On stage he was quieter. Instead of being a lunatic on stage and quiet off!

Ian had these two big bongos on a stand when he joined us, like Edmundo Ross. I said: ‘You can't use those!'

He said: ‘I always used them when I was with Purple.'

‘It won't look right in Black Sabbath, having a set of bongos stuck right in front of you.'

‘Well, I don't know what to do with my hands if I don't have them. I'm so used to hitting them.'

‘It will look terrible, these bloody bongos in the middle of the stage.'

‘What if I put them on the side, by Geezer?'

So he put them by Geezer then. Him tapping his bongos.

One time the crew put some string on them. The idea was to pull them away while he was playing them, so he'd have to follow them. Unfortunately it didn't work out very well. When they pulled on them, the bongos wobbled, nearly falling over. But he was still trying to hit them. We managed to get rid of them in the end, thankfully.

When Ian first joined us he said: ‘I don't know what to wear.'

I said: ‘Everybody wears black or maybe leather.'

‘I don't really wear leather.'

It's a bit difficult singing in Black Sabbath with flowery shirts on, so we asked him to darken down a bit. Had about five or six waistcoats made, all black leather, and in the end he had some leather pants as well. We were actually getting him there bit by bit.

On 13 September we were due to play a bullring in Barcelona. We were invited to this really nice club the night before. The drinks were flowing and then Ian decided that he was going to set the waiter's arse on fire. He got his lighter going while the guy was serving somebody else, burning him on the backside. I thought, here we go, and said to Bev: ‘I'm going to go back to the hotel now.'

He said: ‘I'll come with you.'

But Ian went: ‘Just hang on, we're all coming with you in a minute.'

‘Oh, fucking hell. Well, okay, all right.'

We had another drink and then the place closed, so we went. Ian walked out with his pint of beer and they said: ‘You can't take that outside.'

He did anyway and then it was: ‘Don't push me!'

And bang! A fight started and it was an awful one. They came from everywhere, all the kitchen staff, the waiters, the bloody lot, with knives and martial arts nunchucks and everything. We were just the band and two security blokes. We were fighting for our lives and Ian Gillan was nowhere to be seen. He later claimed he fell in a ditch, but I reckon he legged it. Geezer hit somebody with a glass and it cut his hand open. The police came and they arrested him and one of our security guys. They put them in jail and threw two people from the club in with them, who proceeded to beat our security guy up right there.

How on earth we got back to the hotel I don't know. Then we tried to get a call out to Don Arden, but the hotel had been phoned by the club and they blocked our calls. We all went: ‘Oh, God. Now what?'

They threw us out of the hotel, because they had ties with this club. The Mafia were involved in that; it was a heavy scene. We got on the tour bus and tried to find somewhere to stay, but nobody would have us. We drove for ages and ages and somehow we ended up staying about a hundred yards from where we were originally. We managed to get Don on the phone and he said: ‘I'll send somebody over.'

He arranged this team of eight German heavies to come over. And, sure enough, in the middle of the night, straight away, boom, there they were. The head guy was older, grey hair, glasses, very well dressed, and he said: ‘Just stay in the rooms and don't move. I'll go and see them.'

Don had told me: ‘This man is very serious.'

Supposedly he had killed such and such a number of people and I thought, oh fuck, we don't want to get into that! So I said to him: ‘God, sort it out but don't go there. Please don't make it any worse than it already is.'

He said: ‘They'll listen to me.'

He was a lovely guy and I got along fine with him, but it was like something you'd see in a movie. We played the bullring on the night and I thought, oh dear, we're in the open air, we messed with the wrong people, we're going to get murdered! But the Germans went around all the entrances and all the dressing rooms and secured the whole place. They were real professionals.

The worst of it was, we had a guy from the
Daily Mail
travelling around with us. He saw all this and reported it all in the paper. He came in to do some photographs and a little story about playing in the bullring, but he got a lot more than that.