“Nothing like it”: Tony Iommi explains why it is impossible to cover Black Sabbath
What’s in the air up in the West Midlands that’s responsible for conjuring so many of Britain’s biggest names in hard rock and metal? Judas Priest, Godflesh, Napalm Death, and Slade — yes, Slade, check out ‘Gudbuy Gudbuy’, all burnished in and around Birmingham and the Black Country’s former iron and steelworks communities. The daddy that towers over all of them, however, is the undisputed progenitor of heavy metal Black Sabbath.
Marking a clear break with the hippie residue still lingering from the close of the 1960s, bassist and principal songwriter Geezer Butler poured all of the prior decade’s political tumult, Vietnam trauma, and the city’s creeping industrial decline into a deeper, overcast variant of blues that shone an occultist mirror to the ills and plagues of the world.
Named after the low-budget 1963 horror film featuring Boris Karloff, Black Sabbath seized the eureka moment of offering horror in a band when observing the feature’s lengthy queue at the cinema.
The sole constant member, through its foundations with Ozzy Osbourne and via the Ronnie James Dio era, is guitarist Tony Iommi. Boasting one of the greatest bags of riffs in all of rock, a gift he still flexed on Sabbath’s final 13 album and their farewell The End Tour, naturally closing in their Brummie hometown, Iommi left a stylistic legacy which inspired many gifted guitarists but rarely ever mastered.
“I’ve played with other people who have been technical, and I learned through the period of being on my own and bringing in drummers and bass players that however good you are, it doesn’t mean to say you can play what we played,” Iommi told Total Guitar in ’22.
He added: “And it proved a point because some of these musicians were great players, but you’d say, ‘Can you play ‘War Pigs‘ or ‘Black Sabbath’?’ and they couldn’t get it. No feel. And the amount of times I’d have drummers come in to play, and they’d say, ‘We know all of Sabbath’s stuff,’ and they’d play. ‘Stop! It’s nothing like it. The feel’s not there.’ But technically, they’re great. That really did open my eyes. It’s simple… but it’s not.”
The elusive “feel” that courses throughout Sabbath’s classic run of LPs is a mysterious thing. His unimitable guitar knack may be due to the sheet metal factory accident he suffered at 17, losing the tips of his middle and ring fingers. His DIY-fashioned thimbles enabling his left-handed playing, coupled with his downturned slack strings, established a highly personalised flourish none could match.
Age perhaps finally catching up with him, the magic clearly still returns the moment Iommi hits the stage. “When I feel like it, I go and play now,” he concluded. “And at the moment, I’m really far away from it because there’s so many other things going on; the last thing I want to do is pick up a guitar! But when I do pick it up, I really enjoy it. And I liked it when I could sit with the band and come up with ideas and come up with riffs. Or, at home, I come up with riffs. Then I’m in my element.”
