Iron Man (23 page)

 

With Toni-Marie, my aunt Pauline and Maria

 

My Birmingham star on the city's Walk of Fame

 

A press conference with Ian Gillan in Armenia, 2009. We received the Order Of Honour award for the charity single we made 25 years earlier

 

Grown up baby: Toni-Marie

 

Maria and I at the Classic Rock Awards

 

Nijmegen, Holland, June 2005

 

Man at work. Donington Festival, June 2005

It came back at me, because I went to the loo one day in my bedroom and lifted the lid up, and, bloody hell, there was a snake there. Dead one again. Shat myself before I could reach the toilet seat.

We played jokes on each other all the time. Joking around like that makes people get along better. It's also a test I suppose, to see if somebody is going to be able to put up with it.

Things were going very well, but we still had Don going: ‘It's never going to work. If you don't get Ozzy back, that's it.'

We were at work at the house and all of a sudden some guys turned up to take the furniture away that Sharon had rented for us. Gradually we were seeing things going missing. We warned each other: ‘Don't let them in. They'll take the couch!'

It was absolutely awful, so we decided to sever our relationship with Don completely. He had wanted to manage us for such a long time, and now he had looked after us for only a short while. Sandy Pearlman, an American guy who managed Blue Öyster Cult, then wanted to take us on. We kept that on the back burner, because we went back to doing it ourselves, just like we had done before Don took over. We still had Mark Forster working for us, who had helped out with the day-to-day stuff since the
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
days. He was like an assistant, travelling around with us, organising the hotels and transportation and whatnot.

Mark had some physical problem, an elephantiasis-type of thing in his groin. The silly thing was, he'd be standing there and he'd have this big bulge and instead of trying to hide it, he'd put a stage pass on it, so the first place you'd look was down there.

I got a call one day after the Ronnie line-up had broken up, to be told that Mark had died. They couldn't find any family, so they asked: ‘Do you want his belongings?'

I said: ‘No, I don't want anything.'

I felt really bad. Mark was English, but he must have married an American, because I think he had a son somewhere. I told them this, but I didn't know where he was.

Anyway, with Mark still being very much alive and assisting us at the time, we decided we had no option but to move out of the house. The Ardens had virtually emptied the place and the lease was up. We thought, let's move away from LA altogether. It was the wrong place for us then.

So we shipped out to Miami.

We looked around the plane flying to Miami and said: ‘Why is there nobody on this flight?'

It turned out we were flying into a hurricane and everybody was leaving the place. We thought, everybody's going out and we are coming in!

We got there and everything was boarded up. We had rented Barry Gibb's house, but we stayed at a hotel first for three days, because it was dangerous everywhere else. They boarded the building up completely. Getting ready for this storm you had to fill your bathtub and you couldn't leave the hotel. They had sandwiches there, but of course they ran out of food in the end. One day me and Geoff stood on my balcony like two idiots and we saw all the trees swaying. Then we heard: ‘You! Hey you! Get back in the room! Get off that balcony!'

It was this policeman.

‘You idiots, get in the room!'

It was frightening. It got to a point where they said: ‘Now it's too late to leave so you got to stay. Get to shelters!'

We went: ‘Oh Christ. Here it comes.'

We only caught the edge of the storm. There were lampposts
blowing over, traffic lights flying around and trees being uprooted, but it didn't hit with the full force. Still, it was bad enough to frighten the shit out of us.

We stayed at Barry Gibb's house for months. He'd moved into another place. We did the same as we did in LA: we created a rehearsal studio where we set all the gear up. We had Craig Gruber come in, a bass player who used to be with Rainbow, just like Ronnie. We kept Geoff because we got on so well with him that we tried him on the keyboards. He was fairly new to it, but he was good enough for what we wanted: play the chords and come up with some ideas as far as what to play behind the chords.

We wrote more stuff, without Geezer this time. It was awkward for me and Bill, because we were so used to working with him. Everything felt like it was on a temporary basis, because we were still hoping that Geezer would come back. It was hard, but we carried on. Writing actually went really smoothly and we soon finished an album's worth of songs.

Bill was really boozing a lot. He had his wife with him there and she was drinking heavily as well. Bill would wake up in the morning, all bright, and he'd have a beer from the fridge, and another beer and another beer. I'd go: ‘Bill, how many beers have you had now?'

‘Oh, I've only had two.'

But it would be about ten by then. It became known as ‘he's only had two'.

Throughout the day he'd go from this pleasant phase to being really dismal, changing as he was drinking more. We'd avoid him by nine or ten o'clock at night, because he would get into a real down state of mind and become aggressive. Meanwhile, his playing was fine. He'd drink in the mornings but he was playing all right if he'd only had a few. It was afterwards, at night, that he'd slip into the next stage. And if we decided to have a day off, bloody hell, he'd go for it all the way.

As ever, Bill was the one we'd play jokes on. On one occasion, I got this number of Alcoholics Anonymous and the name of the guy in charge. I said to Bill: ‘Some fucking bloke's called up. You've got an interview.'