Iron Man (33 page)

Cozy was really helpful. He stayed for two or three weeks at my house and we'd sit in a room, get a bottle of wine and off we'd go. I had all these ideas, Cozy would tap along and come up with ideas as well. We had the tape player going and just jammed around. If nothing came up we'd chuck it and go for the next one. Maybe we'd go for a walk, come back and have another go. It really worked well. We'd get Tony Martin over and then get into a rehearsal room and try it with everybody. We felt inspired. We were coming up with stuff and we were really pleased with it.

Around that time I heard again from Gloria Butler that Geezer might want to come back. I was telling Cozy about that and he was going: ‘What's happening? Is he going to do it or not?'

‘I don't know. Gloria said he will.'

But the return of Geezer never happened. We recorded our next album,
Headless Cross
, with this session guy called Larry Cottle. He was a jazz player and a bloody good one at that. We had him on the video of
Headless Cross
, but he didn't look like the sort of guy
to be in a rock band. We weren't even sure he'd be the sort of person who would go on tours, because he was used to doing Ronnie Scott's and little jazz clubs like that. But he was such a good bass player. He'd come to the studio and say: ‘What sort of thing do you want? What about this? Or that?'

And he'd play all these different kinds of things.

‘Yeah! That's it!'

He did a great job and that was it. He played everything on
Headless Cross
and left after the recording.

We recorded the album from August through to November in the Woodcray Studios, a little farm place in Berkshire, not far from London. They had a studio there and two or three bedrooms. Cozy would come on his motorbike and then go home, because he lived not that far from there. Me and Cozy produced the album ourselves. Of course, I couldn't tell Cozy what his drums sound should be. He knew what he wanted and before we started recording he'd test his drums for however long it took to get them right. And then I'd do the guitar and all the rest of it.

We were really determined to make a good album. We were excited because we were playing together and we brought out the best in each other.

Tony Martin wrote the lyrics to all the songs.
Headless Cross
is a little village in the vicinity of Birmingham and Tony made it famous. We did a video for the title track at a place called Battle Abbey in Battle, near Hastings, in Sussex. It was the exact spot where William the Conqueror had defeated King Harold at the Battle of Hastings about a thousand years ago.

Working in this dilapidated old abbey was all right during the day, but they didn't start the actual filming until something like midnight. They wanted to capture the light coming back up in the morning out of these ruins while we were playing there. By that time it was hellishly cold and we were frozen stiff. Cozy was drinking brandy just to keep warm, but he got pissed as a parrot. He
nearly fell off his drum stool. I had a big red nose and couldn't feel my hands. We did catch the morning light, but we caught flu as well.

I got Brian May to play the solo on ‘When Death Calls'. He came down a lot when we were recording, sat in the studio and talked away. And I said: ‘Do you want to . . . play on the album?'

‘Ah, can I?'

‘Yeah!'

‘What do you want me to play?'

So I'd get a track out.

‘Play on that?'

‘Yeah, okay!'

He just improvised, because he'd only heard it for the first time right then and there. I left him in the studio for an hour and came back: ‘How are you getting on?'

It was great; he was really good. We've played together many times because we enjoy it so much. We've even talked about making an album together. One day.

On ‘Nightwing' we used Tony Martin's guide vocals, because he never sang it quite the same after that. He tried it a couple of times, but we went: ‘No, we'll keep the original because it's got that feel to it!'

Things like that also happened a lot with my guitar parts. I'd just play it a certain way and that was it. You try it again, and then you try to get too precise. So I've kept guitar parts that were on the original demo for the track. The same with solos. That's why I always try and do the solos in the first few takes, because otherwise it gets too robotic. I prefer to do a solo instinctively, to just go and play. When I record a track in the studio I'll usually play six solos in a row. Then I'll ask myself, is it getting better or worse? Usually they get worse as I go on. If I don't capture it in so many tries, I'll leave it for a while. It's better to try again later, with a fresh outlook on things.

I play solos off the cuff. I'm not good at sitting down and working the solos out, so when I play different tries for a solo, they vary a lot. I can never play them exactly the same. That was really embarrassing when I did one of the first instructional videos. They said: ‘We want to play ‘Neon Knights', ‘Black Sabbath' and ‘Heaven And Hell'. Can you play the solos to them?'

‘Well, I'll play
a
solo.'

So I did and then they said: ‘Can you play it slow now?'

I went: ‘Oh, fuck. I don't know what I played!'

Brian May can play his stuff note for note, but I can't. I just played the solo that went with the thing, similar but not quite the same. And it certainly was impossible for me to play it slowly so that people could learn it. I started thinking about it then: what do I play? How did I play that? And once I started thinking about it, forget it. So when you watch that video, you'll see that I played it different on the slow version. I can remember riffs until they come out of my ears. I remember riffs from years ago that I haven't even recorded. But when it comes to playing a solo note for note, and trying to play that version slow, forget about it.

Headless Cross
was released in April 1989. It did much better than
The Eternal Idol
, but we were very unhappy about the way I.R.S. promoted it in the States. Off we went to America to do a tour and, as you do, we went round the record shops and there wasn't a fucking album in sight. There wasn't even a poster up, nothing. Cozy blew his top: ‘What the fuck's going on, there's no advertising, there are no albums in the shops!'

In Europe the way they worked that album was fantastic. In fact,
Headless Cross
did better there than the original Sabbath albums with the old line-ups had done. We went: ‘Bloody hell, finally!'

So it's safe to say that it wasn't down to the quality of the music that it didn't do all that well in America.

When it was time to do some shows, we approached a bass player Cozy knew. He said: ‘Shall we get a meeting together with Neil Murray and see how you get on with him?'

Neil turned out to be a great player. Finally, we had a real, credible and very good band together.

We toured America in June 1989, me and Cozy, Tony Martin, Neil Murray and Geoff Nicholls, but we went home after about two weeks. There was a stark lack of promotion, not only for the album but for the shows as well. We were meeting people in town: ‘What are you doing here?'

‘Oh . . . We're playing here tonight.'

‘Eh?'

It was all very Spinal Tap-ish.

At the end of August we started our UK tour. We ended the old-fashioned way, with two Hammersmith shows. Brian May came up and did ‘Heaven And Hell', ‘Paranoid' and ‘Children Of The Grave'. He hadn't played that last one with us before and so he shouted: ‘What key is it in?'

‘It's just in E!'

It went very well. At another gig on that tour I brought Ian
Gillan up to do ‘Smoke On The Water' and ‘Paranoid', which was great for the fans. It went down a storm. We could never do things like get Brian or Ian up with the original line-up, because that was too set.

We had a good time on these tours because there wasn't much pressure, apart from the usual financial worries. We stayed in lesser hotels, travelled all together on the bus and cut down in all sorts of ways, but we had a great time together. We did what we were supposed to be doing: play.

We'd had a lot of trouble in the early years with religious nutcases but it came as quite a surprise when in 1989 it started again. We were in Mexico having just toured Japan, and the visit began well in a lovely hotel supplied by the promoter. We were told that there had been a bit of a campaign against us orchestrated by the Catholic Church and backed by the local mayor but were assured it was all OK. We didn't realise how big a deal it was; all we'd come to do was play a show. We also subsequently learnt that the football stadium we were due to play in was the third choice after the promoter was refused permission in other towns – not sure we'd have gone if we'd known that!

Anyway we tried to relax for a couple of days but the crew were nervous as there were a lot of heavy security guys hanging around with guns and the facilities at the stadium were extremely basic. And as the crew went to set the gear up they were suddenly arrested at the site. These security guys wouldn't allow the show to go on purely because the police were worried about riots and God knows what else.

We were told that fans were coming from all over Mexico by train, it was really a big deal, so we thought maybe if we went down and had a look at the stadium for ourselves it would help.

But before we could get going instructions came through to us saying ‘pack-up, we're leaving', as the mayor had now banned the show and thousands of disappointed kids were likely to
blame us. You don't argue with a man with a machine gun and by then the first of the trains had arrived and the fans were pouring out. The station was right next door to our hotel so we had to lie-down on the floor of a minibus while the driver abandoned the road and nearly turned us over trying a short cut through a huge drainage ditch! Escape made, we sped on to Mexico City where we made sure we were on the next plane back to the UK!

We did go back to Mexico with Heaven & Hell in 2007. Maybe they've forgiven us or simply not associated the band with Black Sabbath.

After Mexico, we went on to Russia, another exotic country. We did ten nights in Moscow at the Olympic Stadium, a massive place, and it was sold out. On Saturdays we did an afternoon show as well. The audience would go out after that show and then they'd all come back in again for the evening one.

We were supported by Girlschool. The first night at the hotel in Moscow we went to the bar and one of the girls was there as well. Then their bass player came in and, just like that, punched her in the face. We went: ‘Bloody hell! What was all that about? Christ, we haven't even started the tour yet and they are fighting already!'

Really peculiar. But they turned out to be all right. They could drink a bit as well. And Cozy had a little romance with their singer and guitar player, Kim McAuliffe, that went on for a short while after the tour. She was a really nice girl.

Playing in Russia was weird because in the hall in Moscow the first rows of seats were set back, away from the stage, and all of them were taken up by officials, with all these men dressed up in suits and women in ballroom-type dresses. They obviously had something to do with the government, and looked so out of place, as if they should have been at a different gig altogether. The rowdy kids were behind them, except that they couldn't be rowdy. The
security guys wouldn't stand for that. They were pretty heavy with the kids.

It was winter and freezing cold. Every day they'd pick us up in a van and drive us to the gig, together with this big metal container in the back full of soup. We took all our own catering with us. The food was locked up in one of the rooms and we had a guard on it, but it still went missing. It was just at the time when they were pulling down all the statues of Lenin. The country hadn't opened up yet; there wasn't a McDonald's or anything at that point. Our caterers went down to the market to buy fresh food and often they'd be in trouble. If they bought up all the chickens and vegetables and whatever else, the locals would be up in arms. It was bloody hard for them.

We stayed at this hotel called the Ukraine. It was a bit like Grand Central Station, because it had a big open lobby and it was really cold in there. We had two KGB people travelling with us all the time and we were very aware of them keeping an eye on us. I wondered if our rooms were bugged. It was so behind the times that if you wanted to make a phone call you had to book it well in advance. My room was very depressing. It was big but it only had a bed and a china cabinet in it, with pieces of the china going missing every other day. It was obviously the maids taking cups and saucers and whatnot, but I got the blame.

The hotel was very dodgy as well. When you looked under the balcony, you saw all these credit cards lying there. People had obviously been robbed and the thieves had thrown out the stuff they couldn't use. Some of our crew actually did get robbed. Two of them were sharing a room and one of them took his clothes off and went to bed. He heard somebody come in and he thought it was the other bloke. It wasn't. It was a thief, who nicked all his clothes, his wallet and everything.

After Moscow we did another ten days in Leningrad. The crowd
was different there, much more like a regular crowd and right up the front as well. It was really good.

But we came back with loads of caviar, especially Cozy, who was a big wheeler-dealer. He got in with the manager of the Olympic Stadium. We went up to his office and this bloke had all these tins of caviar and hand-painted lacquered boxes and so on lying about. We gave him a couple of T-shirts for this, a pair of sneakers or whatever for that. They loved the T-shirts with the band's name on them, so Cozy ended up with a suitcase full of Beluga caviar. God knows what that would be worth.