“A truly great player”: The artist Tony Iommi said no one could play like
Everyone has different criteria and skillsets that they look for in their musical idols, and for guitarists, it could be a range of different things that attracts someone to a certain playing style. You might look up to someone with the smoothness of Eric Clapton for example, but if you want something more free and experimental, then perhaps Jimi Hendrix is the one you want to idolise. However, if you’re a heavier player, then the one true pillar of influence that one should look towards is Tony Iommi.
As the progenitors of heavy metal, Iommi was largely responsible for helping to establish the cataclysmic sound that Black Sabbath became known for, and his riffs were often delivered in brutalistic fashion. That’s not to say there was no finesse to his work, as he was still able to play with a sense of clarity, but nobody had really achieved significant fame from playing in such a distorted and downright ferocious manner prior to Iommi.
The most remarkable thing about him as a guitarist was that he managed to overcome a small disability that hampered his guitar playing in his late teens, after the tops of two of his fingers were severed in an industrial accident. While this made fretting notes difficult for him at first, he persevered through the injury, and eventually became a world-renowned player in the hard rock and burgeoning heavy metal scene in the early 1970s.
While Iommi was significantly inspired by jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, who was at a similar disadvantage to Iommi having lost the use of three of his fingers in a fire, there was one guitarist who Iommi looked up to as being a truly unique player that he couldn’t help but admire and attempt to replicate the innovations of.
Jeff Beck is often regarded as one of the great British blues heroes, alongside his Yardbirds predecessor, Clapton, and the likes of Peter Green in Fleetwood Mac, and many still hail him as one of the world’s greatest gifts to guitar playing to have ever lived. It wasn’t just blues that Beck was proficient in either, and his contributions to the world of rock and jazz were also highly regarded. It was for this that Iommi could not ignore just how untouchable Beck was as a player.
In a 2024 interview with Guitar World, Iommi praised the work of Beck, citing him as one of the most original guitarists he’d ever heard. “Oh yeah, Jeff was great,” he proclaimed. “I met Jeff early on because we had the same manager. He was so different and unique. A truly great player who was just doing his own thing that was 100 percent him. It’s true what they said; nobody could play quite like Jeff.
For all his versatility, inimitable style and assuredness around the instrument, there certainly haven’t been many other players who come close to Beck in terms of their expertise and innovation, but coming from a player like Iommi, who is just as responsible for laying down the foundations of entire musical movements, you can hardly say that he doesn’t come close.
