The magical story of Tony Iommi’s missing fingers
Guitarists need their digits like a hammer needs nails. Except Tony Iommi. Tony Iommi is pure stumpy-handed magic. “Without Tony, heavy metal wouldn’t exist. He is the creator of heavy,” Eddie Van Halen once proclaimed. That didn’t always seem likely.
It’s been long established that the world seeps into art like water into a sponge, long before art is wrung back out into the world. Even Aristotle said so in 384 BC when he laid down the mantra: “The purpose of art is to represent the meaning of things. This represents true reality, not external aspects.”
Little did he know that his statement would beget a bunch of scallies from Birmingham who would change the world with heavy metal music. In fact, as it happens, Tony Iommi’s missing fingers are perhaps the most veracious and poetic embodiment of Aristotle’s statement in the history of art.
You see, the flower power of Laurel Canyon’s counterculture had no place amid the heavy industry and blitz rubble of Birmingham, where a daisy change would already be covered in soot a few minutes before it could be placed in anyone’s hair. Disillusioned by the happy, hippie American scene, Iommi thought about capturing the true reality of his own existence. That isn’t all that easy; the closest thing was possibly the blues. So, he learnt how to play them.
He picked up the guitar in his early teens and began riffing away to the likes of Chuck Berry. It was a pleasant pastime; however, art seemed a world away as a profession. The industry that Birmingham was built upon was taking a hit as political austerity slowed growth in the region. The future looked bleak for working-class Brummie lads.
Nevertheless, music provided a vital outlet for Iommi and his mates. It’s where he seemed to belong. After all, following a fall in the playground that left him with a permanent scar, the subsequent nickname ‘Scarface’, and the teasing that went along with it, Iommi was inclined to enjoy the catharsis of rock ‘n’ roll.
The birth of Black Sabbath
It quickly became clear that Iommi and his mates weren’t just fooling around for cheap thrills, though. When Black Sabbath first played, they simply had a certain something nailed down. “I knew from the day we went into Aston Community Centre and played ‘Black Sabbath’ for the first time that we were different,” Bill Ward told Louder Sound in 2022.
He continued, “We had something I didn’t understand, and I knew that I loved it.” They all did, but they could hardly afford to quit their day jobs and the only nepotistic favours they could call upon was if someone needed a machinist to try and fix their guitar.
So, this left Iommi heading off to work at a local sheet metal factory. One day, while he was dreaming of the guitar, an absent-minded move resulted in a tragic accident. He lost the tips of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand. “I was told ‘you’ll never play again’. It was just unbelievable,” Iommi told the BBC.
Brutal machinery had severed his dreams, quite literally. “I sat in the hospital with my hand in this bag and I thought, ‘that’s it – I’m finished’,” he recalled. “But eventually I thought, ‘I’m not going to accept that. There must be a way I can play’”.
Iommi’s brave redemption
Ironically, that glim hope would only be fully illuminated thanks to a visit from his foreman. Much to Iommi’s initial displeasure, the foreman played him some guitar music. It was tragically akin to taking a recently bepenised man to a brothel. After feeling like a seasick blind man on a glass bottom boat for a few minutes, Iommi mustered up the strength to say, “I thought it was really good” in response to the recently silenced ‘45 on the turntable.
His boss replied, “You know, the guy’s only playing with two fingers on his fretboard hand because of an injury he sustained in a terrible fire.” Iommi recalls in his memoir, “I was totally knocked back by this revelation and was so impressed by what I had just heard that I suddenly became inspired to start trying to play again.”
He had just been listening to the classic jazz guitarist Django Reinhardt, and now he was deeply inspired to follow in his fingerless footsteps. Iommi decided to fashion a very working-class solution. He went home, melted down a Fairy Liquid bottle and made some plastic fingertips for himself.
This changed his guitar playing immeasurably. Naturally, it made it entirely individualistic. He had to press down hard on the strings, developed a propensity for bar chords, opted for light strings, which led to great vibrato, and he applied a trilling style akin to B.B. King’s bluesy growl. In essence, it resulted in the tenets of heavy metal guitar playing. All thanks to crunching machinery, Reinhardt, Fairy Liquid, and a fair bit of human ingenuity.
As Brian May proclaimed, he is “the true father of heavy metal”. From the dark days in a hospital bed, thinking his guitar-playing days were over, he not only “persevered” with his homemade plastic fingertips, but eventually went back to jamming with his mates, flushed with an entirely new sound.
Now, as Black Sabbath began to take shape, they had a sound that fit their style and a defiance that made it soar. Thus, the greatest literal allegory in art was complete. Music reflects the world around it, so Birmingham was bound to take rock ‘n’ roll in a grisly direction.
However, things got even more literal when an area befallen by tragedy pushed a young man towards a heavy metal factory, and a tragic accident within that heavy metal factory resulted in heavy metal music, a genre psychologically proven to relieve the pain of tragedy. It’s a complicated loop, but it was never going to be clear and easy when it comes to Iommi.
