Iron Man by Tony Iommi

Author:Tony Iommi
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Published: 2011-11-02T16:00:00+00:00

47

Heaven and Hell

We recorded Heaven and Hell at the Criteria Studios in Miami, the same place where we had recorded Technical Ecstasy a couple of years earlier. For the first time since Master of Reality we had somebody else producing it, which was a great help. Martin Birch took a lot of the strain off me. He had done a few good albums by big name bands already, like Rainbow. Ronnie recommended him, so we thought we’d try him.

We were back in Florida, which meant there were drugs galore. A neighbour next to Barry Gibb’s house had constant supplies of coke like you wouldn’t believe. I’d visit him and he would have pounds of it in a big pile on the table.

‘Here, help yourself.’

It was unbelievable. Here we were at four o’clock in the morning: ‘Can we just pop around for a bit?’

And he would be up!

‘Yeah, just pop around.’

We just went over the top because it was there, on our doorstep. It didn’t stop our creative juices flowing.We’ve always had a fifth member, a presence, a guiding light if you like, that led us in the right direction. It was there when we were in Miami at Barry’s house and we wrote ‘Die Young’. In that song there’s a break. In the part where Ronnie sings ‘die young’, it drops down to a quiet passage. At that time Ronnie had never done stuff like that, with a drop-down, it was always out and out, go! I said to him: ‘We’ve done it for years in a lot of the Sabbath stuff, we put a quiet bit in the middle of it.’

And Ronnie said: ‘Oh, yeah, it works!’

It was another learning experience for him, seeing how we wrote and what you can do, somewhere else to go, a different area. I felt I knew where to go on these things. I think we all did, we all felt: this is the fifth member guiding us. ‘Die Young’ is a well-structured song. It was the second single, after ‘Neon Knights’, and to this day it goes down really well.

‘Children Of The Sea’ was the one that we had already done when Ozzy was still there. I still have a version with him singing on it somewhere, with a different lyric and a totally different vocal melody to what Ronnie did with it. When we recorded the new version, I wanted it to sound like galley slaves rowing a big ship. In my head I could hear this monk-type chant, so we said to the guy at the studio: ‘Anywhere we can hire some monks?’

He phoned around, trying to find some monks. It was a bit of a joke, really. But he came back all serious and said: ‘Well, we can only get one monk . . . but he can overdub!’

‘Ah!’

I got him to come in and, ‘oo-oooo-ooo’, let him do his chant. We were in stitches. We had imagined this whole choir and we got one monk.

But he could overdub.

When

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