The “untouchable” band that inspired Lita Ford to pick up a guitar
The usual advice in show business is to ‘never meet your idols’, but Lita Ford of The Runaways went in the polar opposite direction, and as a 13-year-old girl in 1972, to her first rock ‘n’ roll concert, and by the following decade, she’d have a hit duet with one of the guys on stage and an engagement ring from another.
Along the way, of course, she achieved very early fame as one of the members of The Runaways, the pioneering all-girl rock band that released its debut album in 1976. Ford was 17 at the time, but was the oldest and most musically experienced member of the group, which also included a 16-year-old Joan Jett. The former was recruited as the lead guitarist and immediately proved herself as a force to be reckoned with on Runaways hits like ‘Cherry Bomb’.
Born in London, Ford and her family moved to America when she was about eight years old, eventually settling in Long Beach, California.
“When I was about 13, I started listening to Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Jimi Hendrix, and Led Zeppelin,” Ford told the AP in 1984, “They’re still my favourite bands, too. I always hung out with the boys. I only had one girlfriend I hung out with. I used to play her things, but she didn’t really care much about music.”
Around this same period, Ford attended her first rock gig, where Black Sabbath were at the height of their powers, with her recalling to Knight-Ridder News in 1990, “I remember looking at that band as if they were untouchable, some sort of gods. I don’t know what I thought—maybe that they were beamed up on stage at the beginning and just disappeared at the end. I know I didn’t think about them as people with friends and lives and families. But I was just 13.”
Gods or not, the experience of seeing Sabbath further inspired Lita Ford to start practising more seriously on the guitar she’d purchased. She would form her first high school rock band a couple of years later, and not long after that, she was a viable rock star in her own right.
As a result, the musicians in Black Sabbath who’d once seemed thoroughly unapproachable were now seeking her out to collaborate. For a brief time in the mid-1980s, Ford was engaged to Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi (that didn’t end well), and in 1989, she recorded a duet with Ozzy Osbourne, ‘Close My Eyes Forever’, which would become the biggest hit of her solo career, reaching number eight on the US Billboard singles chart.
“Isn’t that weird, that I’d end up writing that song with him?” Ford said, connecting the dots from that first concert experience to the apex of her own recording career, even though, rubbing shoulders with gods does often lead to weirdness of all varieties.
“Once after a concert,” Ford said, “This kid handed me a fan letter that said, ‘Please say hello to Ozzy… I’m his daughter’. What the hell does that mean? And I’ve gotten letters written in blood. Really… Some people are just disturbed.”
