The crazed tour that inspired Spinal Tap: “I’ve not much recollection”
“I wonder how I survived,” Ian Gillan recalled, with no lack of drama, of his days as an Ozzy Osborne stand-in.
The Deep Purple singer’s role on a Black Sabbath album started with a tent pitched on Richard Branson’s lawn and ended with a life-size Stonehenge replica, with no loss of chaos in between, but the agreement that started the tour wasn’t quite as civilised as one would expect.
“This isn’t Deep Sabbath, or Black Purple!” the bassist of the heavy metal band said of Gillian’s addition to the lineup. Geezer Butler had been in Upstate New York when the Deep Purple singer happened to be in town, and had just split up his band, “because I’d literally run out of money”. As he told Louder Sound, “I lost my house, my studio, even my car. Anyways, Sabbath had just fired Ronnie Dio”, the Rainbow singer who had been the immediate replacement for Osborne for two albums since the legend’s departure in 1979.
It had come around to 1982 by the time the singer-less Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler bumped into the band-less singer Gillan. The coincidence resulted in a passionately inebriated meeting, and an unexpected decision: “I actually agreed to join the band when I was completely drunk…and I was literally under the table. I’ve not much recollection of what went on,” he remembered, somehow.
“But the next day my manager, Phil Banfield, rang me and said, ‘The next time you decide to make a career decision, consult me first!’ Apparently, I’d agreed in my drunken state to join Sabbath! So, there was no formal offer, just a very drunken discussion, and, as far as I can remember, I remained pissed for virtually the whole time I was with the band,” he explained. Although his recoding days in Oxfordshire resulted in him having to sleep in a tent outside Manor studios because of the havoc wrecked by the constant Sabbath parties, there seemed to have been no lack of fun.
The story of their collaboration went quite differently when it came to Iommi’s memories of the encounter, with the band’s guitarist telling Guitar World: “When we first put that line-up together, it was only on paper, done purely by lawyers. Ian is a great singer, but he’s from a completely different background, and it was difficult for him to come in and sing Sabbath material.”
Iommi’s displeasure towards the resulting album Born Again wasn’t shared by the charts, although that might have been a consequence of a de-metalising effect brought in by a certain hard rock frontman. Although Gillian himself was similarly unimpressed with the final result of the album, taking it on tour became a roller coaster carved into rock memory by filmmaker Robert Reiner.
During an interview with Loudwire, Gillian shared: “I remember the day in Birmingham when the Light Sound Productions guys said, ‘Anyone got an idea for a stage set?’ And Geezer Butler said. ‘The Stonehenge’. And they said, ‘Great idea, how do you visualise it?’ And he said, ‘Well, life-size, of course’.” The resulting carbon fibre sculpture was much too large to be hosted in many of the tour’s venues, and on one occasion, for its use, featured a little person called in to dress up as a satanic baby like that on the album cover, and to throw themselves off the sculpture onto a mattress.
The landing didn’t quite go as smoothly as planned, and the memorable event inspired a legendary scene in the 1984 musical mockumentary This Is Spinal Tap. The fun didn’t quite stop there, as heavy metal was so far from Gillian’s modus operandi that he had to read a lot of the Sabbath lyrics off a prompt sheet, while the road crew attempted druid disguises that embodied the comical much more than they did the spectral. As a whole, the tour seems like much more of a laugh than what a Sabbath tour should have been, but I guess that’s why Gillian only got one go.
