Tony Iommi on his greatest life regret: “It became a burden”
Hunched up in his hospital bed aged 17, Tony Iommi felt like it was all over. He wasn’t physically dying, but arguably, to the teenager, something much worse had occurred: the death of his lifelong dream. This existential despair was much more all-encompassing than the pang that fizzed away at his fingertips on his right hand. After the accident on his last day at the sheet metal factory, it seemed the door had slammed shut on pursuing his goal of becoming a lauded guitarist.
Like a footballer suffering a debilitating ACL injury, the young Iommi was told that he would plainly “never play again” after the accident in which he lost the tips of his fretboard fingers. Sat cold and depressed in the hospital bed, with his injured hand in a bag, the teenager could not shake the feeling that he was finished. Yet, like a hare with its back against the cliff face as the wolves close in, the young Brummie would not accept what at first appeared such a sealed and depressing fate.
There had to be a way to escape this stroke of wretched fortune, and there was. In a demonstration of life’s genuinely haphazard essence, his path out of the mire would be in part laid by the foreman at the factory, who, after the accident, introduced him to the work of French jazz guitar pioneer Django Reinhardt, a man who had suffered debilitating burns to his left hand’s ring and little fingers in a fire in 1928. Forced to listen to the king of gypsy jazz by his friend, Iommi’s eyes were almost immediately opened. He was so galvanised by the revelation and the talent on display that he felt inspired to pick up the guitar again.
There were still bumps in the road. Playing the guitar was painful due to his injury. Switching from left-handed to right-handed was always an option to alleviate the discomfort, but young Iommi felt that after playing for three years—a significant span to his youthful self, though merely a drop in the ocean in hindsight—he lacked the patience. As many passionate young men do, he couldn’t imagine starting over. Although learning to play right-handed would have taken him roughly the same time to reach his current level, it seemed an impossible undertaking. So, he decided to push on with what he had.
To protect his injured extremities, Iommi crafted plastic thimbles from a used Fairy Liquid bottle he’d melted down, soldered and shaped like a finger with sections cut from a leather jacket to cover the prosthetic. Yet, such crude innovation prompted two major practical snags. The thick tips meant he couldn’t feel the strings, so he often pressed down hard on them by accident, and their robust nature also meant he struggled to bend the strings. As light gauge strings were not yet a reality, he resorted to using the thinner banjo strings until the onset of the 1970s when Picato finally started manufacturing them.
Given the practical nature of his position, Iommi’s style would switch, meaning that his injured fingers were primarily used for fretting chords rather than the busy solos that were popular at the time. Sometime later, he also began to tune his guitar down to lower pitches from standard tuning, as heard on Black Sabbath’s 1971 third album Master of Reality with tracks such as ‘Children of the Grave’ and ‘Into the Void’, as it not only created a more expansive and heavier sound but slackened the strings, allowing him to bend them more.
It was out of necessity that Iommi’s uniquely dark and sludgy approach formed; despite his band’s desire to do something haunting and utterly distinct from the flower-power movement, they made no bones about hating.
Ironically, his style positioned him as the tip of the group’s spear. His work allowed them to step out from the crowd and institute the key foundations of the entire metal genre, meaning that without his resounding fretboard innovations, there would be no Eddie Van Halen – a close friend of his – James Hetfield, Billy Corgan, Jerry Cantrell, Slash and many other notable names. It’s not hard to imagine how different music and popular culture would be without him and his disciples.
Despite refusing to give up and creating absolute history with his guitar-playing style, Iommy has always struggled to reconcile his accident and what ensued. When speaking to Classic Rock in 2016, he revealed all of his greatest regrets when asked about them. Before all else, he wishes he didn’t have the accident, as it became a “burden”, and he questioned whether it actually helped his style.
He said: “I would have liked to have not chopped the ends of my fingers off. It became a burden. Some people say it helped me invent the kind of music I play, but I don’t know whether it did. It’s just something I’ve had to learn to live with. It affects your playing style; you can’t feel the strings, and there are certain chords I can’t play. Right at the beginning I was told by doctors: ‘You won’t be playing guitar.’ But I believed I could do it, and I did.”
