BLACK SABBATH’S TONY IOMMI DOES NOT RULE OUT PLAYING “ONE-OFF” SHOWS

Soeaking with Liz Barnes of Planet Rock‘s My Planet Rocks, guitarist Tony Iommi was asked if “that’s really it” for Black Sabbath. He responded (as transcribed by blabbermouth.net): “You can never say never, can you? We’ve known in this band you can never say, ‘That’s never gonna happen again,’ because every time we said that, it has. We never thought we’d get back with Ozzy [Osbourne after] the early years. We never thought we’d get back with [Ronnie James] Dio again; we did. We never thought we’d have Ian Gillan in the band, but we did. So you just can’t say it’s never gonna happen…”

…”The problem is in a band of this size, you can’t just go and go a week of gigs; you’ve gotta do a world tour of 18 months,” he explained. “And when you do that, you have to take that on. When you first mention it, about going out on tour, ‘Yeah. Brilliant. 18-month tour. Fantastic.’ But when you get into a year of it, you get tired. But you have to take it on that long ’cause you’ve got all the crew to keep alive. Everybody’s got a job, so you can’t do one week and then have a month off and do another week, ’cause you won’t get the crew; they wanna have a job. So we’ve done it for that long — we’ve done a world tour and a world tour again. And then it was getting sort of tiring. Even though we had our own plane and we [stayed] in the best hotels — everything was perfect — but you still get tired. We’d have a base in New York when we play in that area, so we’d have the plane there fly in. So you get in at three o’clock in the morning and then try to get to bed and sleep. So it was a regular thing like this. We tried to make it as comfortable as possible. It couldn’t get any easier or [more] comfortable, but it still was tiring. And the late nights and stuff. So, when I was talking to my doctors, they said, ‘You shouldn’t really be doing it to that extent, flying,’ ’cause I’ve got blood cancer. It wasn’t good for me to be doing that much flying. I talked to the guys and I said, ‘It’s probably the time to call it a day now, sort of thing, for now’ of that extensive touring. So that’s really what we did. But the stipulation was we had to end up in Birmingham ’cause that’s where we started.”

According to Iommi, the band has never ruled out performing again. “We haven’t stopped it,” he said. “It’s just the major touring that has come to a stop; I wouldn’t wanna do 18-month tours again. But that doesn’t say we wouldn’t do any one-off stuff.”

In other Iommi news, he recently released his first new music in eight years, Scent Of Dark, that coordinates with a male fragrance of the same name.

Iommi collaborated with Momo of Xerjoff on the scent, which is described as smelling like a hark back to ‘60s and ‘70s-era rock, festivals and gatherings by way of amber and patchouli, and pays tribute to Iommi’s ’64 Monkey Gibson SG Special by incorporating “spicy and seductive scents.”

To listen to Scent Of Dark, please go here or to order Iommi’s signature scent, visit the official Xerjoff website.

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