“I didn’t have any friends”: Tony Iommi on the career low point for Black Sabbath
Every band that has been around for more than a decade usually has its fair share of low points throughout its career. No one can claim to have the best track record either in the studio or onstage, and there comes a point where some of them have to strip things back and see what they were doing wrong before rising back up again. Although the turnover for Black Sabbath from Ozzy Osbourne to Ronnie James Dio is one of the most impressive feats in metal, Tony Iommi felt that things started to stall out only a few years later.
That’s not to say that Sabbath were knocking it out of the park on every single release. Despite having some of the greatest metal ever made under their belt, they still couldn’t get arrested by the critics, who normally treated them as a poor man’s version of Led Zeppelin who were destined to make ugly music for the rest of their lives.
While albums like Master of Reality and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath have seen their time in the sun these days, Technical Ecstasy marked when things began going wrong. Since Osbourne was hardly showing up to the studio, he was practically out the door by the end of Never Say Die, leading to Dio turning them into heavy metal juggernauts all over again the minute ‘Neon Knights’ began on Heaven and Hell.
Part of the reason why Dio worked so well within Sabbath was his ability to shape their sound. They had been a blues-based metal act before, but hearing Iommi change his riffs put them in the same conversation as newer acts like Iron Maiden that were starting to dominate the conversation. But there’s a fine line between getting better with age and getting lame, and Sabbath crossed it the minute that Dio left.
Although getting Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan was far from a bad idea, the execution of Born Again was among the biggest fumbles by a major act. Ignoring the offensively bad album art, the songs sounded like hot garbage, from the Spinal Tap levels of cringe on ‘Stonehenge’ to trying to compete with punk and landing flat on their face with songs like ‘Digital Bitch’.
The album was always going to be a little bit spotty, but Iommi looks back on Born Again as one of the major lulls in Sabbath’s career, saying, “In the mid-80s, after Ronnie had gone and we’d done the album with Ian Gillan [Born Again], I didn’t have any friends in the band any more. Geezer had gone, Ozzy, Bill, Ronnie. That was a low point, to start all over again. But I never thought about giving up.”
And even though the band never reached the same heights they did with Osbourne or Dio in the group, their later output was still miles better than what Gillan had done here. Say what you will about Tony Martin as Sabbath’s frontman, but hearing him deliver tunes throughout the 1980s is still decent in places and transcendent in others compared to something that sounds like it’s been recorded at the bottom of a well.
Born Again had a lot going for it on paper, but listening to it only proves one major point about any rock outfit. Even if a million points work in one’s favour, it doesn’t matter if the songs are trash.
