Iron Man (39 page)

After the last gig of the American tour we felt it would be a shame to stop, so two months later it was announced that we'd go on, this time headlining the upcoming Ozzfest tour. From the end of May 1999 until the end of August we toured throughout the States with acts like Rob Zombie, Slayer and System Of A Down. On the second stage, among many others, was Maria's band Drain STH, so we were on the road together.

On one of our days off we were staying at the Four Seasons in Palm Beach and Rob Zombie was there as well. Me and Maria were looking out of the window and we saw Rob coming out with his wife. It was roasting out there, but like always Rob was in all his leather gear. He walked up, got on a sunbed and was lying
there, sunbathing the Zombie way. Everybody else was wearing shorts and Rob was dressed to the max in leather trousers, leather top, leather hat and leather boots. Maria and me were in stitches. Rob is a lovely guy, but talk about keeping up the image!

We ended the year with two shows at the NEC in Birmingham. I remember thinking, this could well be our final date ever. I felt a bit sad, not knowing if we were going to do it again. We recorded a live video there, called
The Last Supper
.

That seemed like a perfect name for it, but we weren't done quite yet.

In February 2000 we got our first Grammy, for Best Metal Performance for ‘Iron Man' from 1998's
Reunion
album. I thought, bloody hell, all those years of making music and we get nothing, and when we finally do get a Grammy it's for the live thing! A year or two later we got a nomination for another one, for ‘The Wizard'. I don't really remember why that was nominated, but, then again, I never knew why the first one was either.

Apart from getting a Grammy, 2000 was rather uneventful. In June we had a one-off show at the KROQ Weeny Roast Festival at Angel Stadium in Anaheim, California. Sharon got in touch with us and said it would be a great gig to do. We would be surprise guests, performing after Ozzy's show.

It was definitely a surprise. Ozzy had played his set, and then the revolving stage was supposed to turn and we'd be there and we'd start playing. Throughout the whole day I thought, this is really silly, it's going to be such a quick changeover. How are we going to pull that off?

The stage turned around and I started the riff for ‘War Pigs', the big note, but nothing happened. As the stage turned all my cables were ripped out of my amps and all the power went. My guitar
tech nearly had a heart attack, going: ‘Ooh, what do we do, what do we do!'

It was so embarrassing standing there like a couple of dicks. The audience, who didn't expect us to be playing anyway, was probably thinking, who's that lot there then? After what seemed like an eternity, they wheeled on these two speaker cabinets and Zakk Wylde's Marshall amp, just so we could play. We were only going to do twenty minutes anyway and we spent half that time pissing around. We came off that show and we had another one like that to do in New York. I said to Sharon: ‘There's no way I'm going to do that.'

She went: ‘Well, no, whatever you want...'

I was so embarrassed I couldn't talk to anybody for days after that. I just hid at the Sunset Marquis hotel and kept out of the way.

Back home in England I found some comic relief with Bev Bevan and Jasper Carrott. We'd been friends for years and we talked about doing this band thing as a bit of a laugh. They had done a couple of things and they asked me if I'd join. I said: ‘Yeah, that sounds like a lot of fun.'

Jasper came up with the name Belch. It's the B from Black Sabbath, the E and the L from ELO and the C from Carrott. Jasper is a comedian and in Belch he was the singer.

Phil Tree was our bass player and Phil Ackrill played rhythm guitar. Phil Tree now plays with Bev Bevan in The Move. It was great fun, I really enjoyed that. Belch was a pop band: we played anything from ‘Blue Suede Shoes' to Tina Turner or Dire Straits to ‘All Right Now'. We rehearsed at Jasper's house. The idea was just to play at one of our friend's parties, but what was supposed to be a lark turned into paying gigs. I didn't think we were good enough to be paid, but it started to become serious. We did one gig in Doncaster, a hundred miles from Birmingham, and it was just like the old days. We were all going in Jasper's estate car and we broke
down on the motorway. None of us was used to that any more, because we always had people working for us to sort this stuff out. So we were looking at each other, going: ‘What do we do now?'

‘I don't know.'

‘Christ! We've still got a long way to go!'

Jasper phoned this bloke who worked for him and he arranged for a car to come and pick us up, take us up to the gig and then bring us back afterwards. We finally got to this gig and there was wine, champagne, the works; it was a real big, flash do. We played a little set and then guzzled bottles of champagne.

On the way home we had to stop every twenty minutes because we were all throwing up as we'd drunk so much so quickly. Eventually we all got back to Jasper's drive and everybody fell out of the car going: ‘Bleeehhrghgh!'

It was like forty years ago, only with grown men.

We did a few gigs and we had requests for a lot more. Jasper had a weekly TV show and we even played on that, doing ‘Route 66' and a song by Status Quo. And we had Belch T-shirts as well, really naff ones. But Jasper got too busy doing his comedy shows. He owned a big part of the television production company Celador, and he went on to do
Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
. The other band members got too busy as well. We didn't break up as such; we just didn't have the time to do it any more. But who knows? Maybe we'll do it again someday.

Just for a laugh.

When I told Sharon Osbourne about my idea of making an album with all different singers, she was really interested in releasing it on the Osbournes' label, Divine Records. We had some offers from other companies, but I thought, well, she's good at what she does. She offered us a good amount of money, but, more than that, she was going to get it going, give it a kick up the arse, do the promotion. So we came to an agreement. We seemed to get on well then, but I couldn't resist referring to the many disagreements we'd had in the past when I thanked her in the CD booklet, writing: ‘Who'd have thought it!'

I wrote some of the stuff at my house but most of it was done at producer Bob Marlette's place in California. I didn't quite know what direction to go in after the Sabbath stuff. Follow that or just go off a bit? What we ended up doing was still riffy, but more modern. Bob directed it that way, and he did a good job at that. He's a keyboard player as well, and he had a good ear for what was needed. I wrote the riffs and he put a drum pattern and effects to them. He used a lot of effects, computerised stuff, because he was good at that.

We did what I'd wanted to do when I did
Seventh Star
. This
time, there was huge enthusiasm. We had every singer we wanted and more. We actually had to turn people down. It was also a good experience for me to work with so many different artists. It was a challenge. Take, for instance, how we worked with Billy Corgan on the song ‘Black Oblivion'. We went into the A&M Studios and Billy was going to play bass and sing. He came down to the studio a few days before and I played him some riffs. I recorded them on a little cassette for him to take away and listen to. He came back a couple of days later and brought drummer Kenny Aronoff down to the studio with him. Billy said it would be nice to do a track with loads of different changes in it. We ended up writing and recording it at the same time. It was that quick. There's actually a lot of stuff on the album that we played live. We were jamming and it really pushed your brain.

It helped to have Kenny Aronoff there as well, because he's really good. I'm sure he's one of the few who'd be able to play something with so many changes in it, there and then, as we were doing it.

‘Oh, let's put another bit in here!'

Going through the whole song again and playing it live, it was nerve-wracking. I was working with people I'd never worked with before, writing songs I had to get my head around while normally I'd live with them a bit first, and all that in one day, writing it and recording it. ‘Black Oblivion' with Billy was a tough song in particular, with all those different changes in it, but it turned out great and it was a good experience doing it this way.

‘Laughing Man', with Henry Rollins, was one of the first we put down. Henry came over to Bob's studio, which was basically a small room at his house. Henry was singing away into a microphone while I was sitting on the couch only a few feet away. It's a very heavy track. We had played a couple of things to Henry and he picked that one and wrote all the lyrics to that. He really enjoyed doing it.

Another guy who was really up for it was Dave Grohl. When I had him come down to the studio to do ‘Goodbye Lament', I already had Matt Cameron on drums and Dave said: ‘Oh, I'd love to play this track? Can I play drums as well as sing?'

So he played drums and he was really good. With most singers, like Serj Tankian from System Of A Down, Skin of Skunk Anansie, Phil Anselmo of Pantera, Ian Astbury from The Cult and Billy Idol, we'd send them a cassette with a track we'd written beforehand. They'd put lyrics to them, come down to studios, be there for the day and sing it.

Peter Steele's ‘Just Say No To Love' was very different, because he has such a unique voice. I knew him because we'd had Type O Negative on our tours so often. When he came to the studio he kept saying: ‘I'm so honoured to do this, that you asked me. And I'm really nervous.'

I said: ‘Don't worry. Relax.'

Before he sang he said: ‘Have you got any wine?'

I got him a bottle of wine and to settle his nerves he gulped the whole thing down just like that. I felt sorry for him, really. He died in April 2010, which came as a huge shock to me. Peter was a big, tall and very, very nice guy.

Ozzy wrote the lyrics to ‘Who's Fooling Who'. For Ozzy to sit down and write lyrics was unusual, but he came back with them and did it. It was much the same as when we did ‘Psycho Man', one of the new tracks for the
Reunion
album. He came down and sat there and told a few jokes. It's an all-day thing with him. He then put a bit down and Bob worked with him on that: get a verse first and then build that up. He had done two verses and then I had done an up-tempo thing which I wanted him to sing on as well, but he didn't so I just played a solo in it.

The album was released in October 2000 and it was simply called
Iommi
. Sharon held a big launch party for it. She put a lot of work into it and I thought she did a good job. The album got
great reviews all over the place and especially in America it received a lot of airplay. Sales were good as well, although I wasn't really bothered about that. It was much more important to me that I'd done something that I had wanted to do for a long time. It was nice working with different artists, younger and older.

The year 2001 passed without much incident. Again Black Sabbath joined the Ozzfest, starting off with a couple of gigs in the UK, after which the summer was spent on the road in America. The following year after we skipped the Ozzfest, as we didn't want to headline it every single year. The same bands on the bill every time would be deadly for the fest and we didn't want to get into a situation where people would think, oh . . . them again!

Sharon Osbourne did have a big surprise in store for me that year. In May 2002 she got in touch about me and Ozzy doing a gig at Buckingham Palace for the Queen's Golden Jubilee, celebrating the fact that Queen Elizabeth II had been on the throne for fifty years. I thought, that's a strange request to get us on that show. They were used to having Cliff Richard and The Beach Boys, Tom Jones and Shirley Bassey, Paul McCartney even. But I certainly wouldn't have expected me and Ozzy. That was a real curveball.

They said: ‘Would you mind having Phil Collins play drums?'

‘Of course, great, fantastic!'

And we had Pino Palladino from The Who playing bass, a lovely guy. At our rehearsal we started playing ‘Paranoid' and Ozzy
turned around and gave Phil Collins a really weird look. I know what Ozzy's like, he just does that anyway. But Phil didn't. After a while Ozzy left and I ran through the song with Phil and Pino again. Phil said to me: ‘What's the matter with Ozzy, haven't I been playing it right?'

‘Yes, you've been playing it fine.'

‘But he gave me such a dirty look!'

‘He probably didn't even notice he did that. No, there's nothing wrong.'

‘Oh, I was concerned. Tell me if I'm not playing it right.'

‘You're playing it great!'

The next day we went to Buckingham Palace to do the sound check. It was like Fort Knox to get in it, which is understandable I suppose. We went on stage, outside in the grounds of the Palace. We did our sound check but had to come off stage in the middle of it, because there was a fire in one of the rooms in the Palace. Apparently they had boxes and boxes of fireworks they were going to let off on the night and were concerned we'd all blow up, so they had to go and investigate.

Brian May had called me the day before. He was to go up on the roof to play ‘God Save The Queen', and he said: ‘Would you do it with us?'

I said: ‘Oh God, I can't do that. I would never be able to learn that and be comfortable enough to play it in front of billions of people watching on TV!'