Unbreakable: My New Autobiography (12 page)

I think we all have special people like this in our lives – if we’re lucky. Relationships that have stayed the distance until you’re more than just friends – there’s a bond you build up over years. You can go for ages without speaking and click together again in an instant. That’s a connection worth more than all the money in the world and it becomes more and more important as the years go by.

And in the tough times ahead, when I thought I couldn’t go on, it was these friends who helped pull me through. Thank God for them.

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Back on Top

Back at number 1, where he belongs.

I
n early 2010, we restarted discussions about an album and reunion tour with all the original members of Black Sabbath. Right from the start, Ozzy had reservations about it because he’d been calling the shots for so long, doing his own thing. He’d always stayed close to Bill and Geezer, so any misgivings weren’t on the personal front. It was more to do with business because, of course, everyone works differently.

‘I’m worried about all the old baggage,’ he told me over supper in our kitchen at Hidden Hills one night. There were four big egos involved here, and all of them deservedly so.

Initially I had come up with a three-year plan for Sabbath which included writing, recording and touring – a huge commitment, given the age they all were. Three years is a long time when you’re in your sixties. Precious time. Time not to be wasted. As for the proposed album, they had tried to write one years before and it hadn’t worked. Now Ozzy was scared that if they attempted it again, it would be the same old story: a huge chunk out of his life that he couldn’t get back again.

He was always saying, ‘If the album’s shit, is it going to be all my fault?’ It was a rhetorical question; he wasn’t expecting me to have an answer.

He absolutely wanted to do it, but when he wrote down on a pad the pros and the cons, the cons column was considerably longer than the pros. It meant giving up his own successful band, his bandmates, his commitment to Sony Records – there were still three albums to deliver; not options, these were firm. It meant giving up his own publishing. The list went on. In the end, what persuaded him to go for it was that the legendary record producer Rick Rubin had agreed to work with them on it. Rick is phenomenal. He helped popularise hip hop, and MTV recently named him ‘the most important producer of the last twenty years’. He is a music guru who can work with any genre. And a producer who can have a hit album with Metallica, Johnny Cash, Neil Diamond, Adele and then Black Sabbath has got to be something. He is a musical genius.

He was so good with Sabbath because he knew how to treat them, how to bring out the best in their performance. He nurtured them, he told them constantly, ‘You
can
do this.’ They had never really had that kind of encouragement before.

Something else that was new to them was that he had balls and wasn’t afraid to speak his mind. Rick Rubin wasn’t a yes-man. He was quite capable of telling them, ‘I don’t like that song, actually. It’s not going to go on the album.’ No one had ever said that to them before, so they were in shock. But without Rick on board, pushing them, they would have been far more easily satisfied. Old habits die hard, and they would have written ten songs, then said, ‘OK, here’s the album – put it out.’ And no one would have questioned that – not me, not anyone. But Rick did; he made them keep working at it. He had a clever way of dealing with their egos, of getting them to go that extra mile. He would tell them that their songs were really good, but that he knew they could still do better. They were pushed, really pushed, steadily but so gently that they barely noticed what was happening. He never raised his voice. He just has this uncanny gift of going into their minds, into their psyches. Put simply, he knows how to get the best from musicians.

They made the reunion announcement on 11 November 2011 at Hollywood’s Whisky A Go Go club, on Sunset Boulevard, which had been their first LA gig ever in 1970. So this was a part of Sabbath’s history, and the first time all four of them had been pictured together since their induction into the US Hall of Fame in 2006. The news was well received by the industry.
Kerrang!
said, ‘They are the Beatles of heavy metal. It all starts with Black Sabbath.’

It was all very upbeat and exciting, but behind the scenes there were a few issues. As fucking ever.

Bill, the drummer, had been suffering from heart problems, but everyone was adamant that he come on board with the album and the tour, and he agreed, but negotiations were long and complicated and lawyers’ bills went through the roof.

In the meantime, the writing sessions with Tony, Ozzy and Geezer continued and, in October 2012, Tony was in New York to promote his autobiography,
Iron Man
, before flying on to LA and coming to Ozzy’s studio at our house in Hidden Hills. But each day he kept saying he didn’t feel well, and it was clear to me that he wasn’t his old self. Tony Iommi is a big man, but he looked diminished somehow, sallow and much quieter than usual. Ozzy urged him to see a doctor in LA, but he refused. He would see his own doctor when he got back to England, he said. And he did, when he went home for Christmas, when he was diagnosed with the early stages of lymphoma. He started treatment immediately.

When Ozzy heard the news, he went into deep shock. This was someone he’d grown up with, someone he’d known his entire life, so inevitably it made him look at his own mortality. For Ozzy, Tony
was
‘the iron man’, and when someone he perceived as so strong was floored by cancer, it devastated him.

Naturally, Tony could no longer make the journeys to LA because of his condition and ongoing treatment. In fact, we were all amazed when he said he was determined to continue with the album. So the plan changed. Now all the writing would have to be done at Tony’s home studio in Solihull just south of Birmingham. We established that it would be in sessions of five weeks, because on the sixth week Tony would go into hospital. Everything was changed, and rightly so, to accommodate Tony and the new situation.

Ozzy and Geezer would fly back and forth to Birmingham for these writing sessions. But when Ozzy was at home in Hidden Hills, he was hideous. I can’t say it came as a surprise; he always is when he’s writing an album, because he puts himself under enormous mental pressure, which makes him very hard to deal with – irritable and snappy. But this time he seemed even worse than usual. I put it down to the travelling, to the toing and froing between Birmingham and LA. My husband has never coped well with transatlantic travel, and now he seemed to be more asleep than awake. I assumed it was jet lag, as he always finds it hard for his body clock to adjust. But when he was awake, the least little thing I did would irritate him. I tried to be understanding. Tony had cancer. Ronnie Dio had just died of cancer. And they were all having to deal with this. They were having to go on not knowing what the future would hold. There was one good outcome: all the feuds, all the childish behaviour, all that love-you, hate-you stuff that had gone on for years was forgotten. None of this was important any more. In spite of all the bickering they had done in the past, ultimately these four guys had a love and a respect for each other. For Ozzy, ‘iron man’ Tony had always been a pillar of strength. All I could do was give him space.

As part of the marketing plan, Sabbath had been booked to do a headlining festival tour of Europe in the summer of 2012. It was the perfect vehicle to tease the album that was due for release in early 2013 by debuting a few of the new songs, and for the audience to see them all back together again. The tour dates had been finalised late in 2011, before anyone knew about Tony’s health. His manager kept saying, ‘He’ll be all right. He’s getting stronger.’ After every treatment it would be, ‘Just wait. Wait.’ But I was worried. The dates were all sold out. And these are festivals, they’re one-offs. They can’t just be rescheduled – I mean, at each festival there may be fifteen other bands. So what do you do? You can’t let down the fans, and you can’t let down the promoters.

We agreed to monitor Tony’s health and progression. Some months he was good, some months he wasn’t. But the manager’s line was always, ‘Let’s wait.’ The issue wasn’t the performing. It was the travelling; it was everything involved in getting him on that stage. We waited until the very last minute, but in the end it became clear that Tony just couldn’t do it. He wanted to, but with the therapy he was having you’re not supposed to fly because of the risk of picking up bacteria and viruses. So the decision was made that Ozzy would go out with his band, calling it Ozzy and Friends. And they were. He had Geezer and Slash and Zakk Wylde, and they all did a set. None of the new Sabbath songs were played, which was as it should be. Black Sabbath did appear that summer, but only in England. The first gig was at a small club venue in Birmingham on 19 May, in aid of Help for Heroes. The second was on 10 June, at the Download Festival at Donington Park in front of a crowd of 110,000. This was a spiritual experience because of Tony. Nobody knew if he was going to make it, but he had come back home in triumph. Everyone was chanting his name and it was magical.

After the tour was over, it was back to writing. In the end, they had thirty songs to choose from. The album was recorded in Malibu in Rick Rubin’s studio, and Tony managed to get out for that. It was finally finished in January 2013.

Usually bands take one of the tracks as the album title, but this time nothing felt right and they called it
13
. The number thirteen has a multitude of meanings in different cultures, but it is always mystical. And so it would prove in this case.
13
went straight to number one in thirteen countries.

Once the album was finished and out there, all we could do was wait. Sabbath had always been the underdogs, the band that the majority of mainstream music journalists didn’t understand. They were a blue-collar band with a blue-collar mentality and aggression. Their songs weren’t about boy meets girl and walking in the sunshine. When a couple of the UK broadsheets slagged
13
off, I thought, Thank God, because if it had been well received by them it would have felt like the band had sold out.

Journalists are one thing, but the buying public is quite another. We all felt there was a huge hole in the marketplace for a great hard-edged rock album, but the question was, would Sabbath fill it?

When the pre-orders started to come in, we knew that it was going to be a number-one album in New Zealand, Denmark, Germany, UK, Scandinavia and Brazil. And then came the big one: America. After years and
years
of trying to get them acknowledged, not just for their body of work but for how they influenced other bands, they finally had their hard-earned validation. And as for Ozzy… well, I can’t overstate what it meant to him. After all the borderline insane things he had done in his life, he had always said to me that he only had one ambition left: to get a number-one album in America. He had sold over 100 million albums worldwide as a solo artist and as a member of Black Sabbath, but he had never achieved that. And now he has, and he’s done it with friends he has known since he was a teenager.

They are now, without question, the elder statesmen of what they do, much like Elton John, Rod Stewart or Paul McCartney. But of course, Ozzy’s old insecurities are still there. Already he’s saying, ‘What happens now; how do we top that?’

But first there was the tour to get through. They toured Australia and Japan in the spring of 2013, and North America in the summer. South America came in October, finishing up on 22 December 2013 back in Birmingham, their home town, where it all started.

After this, the future is in their hands. At this point it’s not even a discussion. All I know is that after forty-plus years of trailblazing music, good times, bad times, falling in and out of love with each other, they will go down in music history as the band that had a number-one album forty-three years into their career. No one else has come close. Their first album made number one in the UK on 1 January 1970, and it’s still selling today. They will go down as one of the greatest, most innovative bands of all time.

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