I’m fine with people calling it whatever they like as long as they like it and I like playing it. There has to be a term, and people have put that term on it. Many years ago, we were asked this question and we said, “no, no, we’re heavy rock”. All the stuff I wrote from then was like that.Īre you comfortable with the label heavy metal as far as Black Sabbath as concerned? It felt instinctively right and we knew our direction from then on. As soon as we wrote the first couple of songs, which were Black Sabbath and Wicked World, instantly we had that feeling of excitement inside. We wanted to make it heavy and we wanted to play something that we felt in ourselves. When we first did Black Sabbath, we didn’t know what kind of music it was really. Did you think recording it that you would be creating a new genre of music? Your first record Black Sabbath in 1970 is regarded as the first-ever heavy metal record. We tested the pyro and everybody ran out of the pub thinking it was a bomb. We used to have a lot of effects on stage at one point. I remember one particular incident when we were doing rehearsal for a tour in some part of London which had a big Irish community.
We were over in America quite a lot at that point. I went to a Catholic school as did Terry (Geezer) Butler, whose family are Irish, so we knew quite a few Irish people growing up.ĭo you remember the Birmingham pub bombings in 1974 and the aftermath? I worked in a factory and I think it is a big part of where the music comes from within you, the way you lived your life. The way we were brought up and where we lived in Birmingham was really important to us. How important is industrial Birmingham to your story? A lot of people said I wouldn’t be able to do it. It really set me back, but it gave me an incentive to fight and to try and overcome it and come up with a way of being able to play guitar. When the fingers first happened, it was devastating. You don’t know how long you are going to be here and how bad it is going to get. It was similar, but the thing with the fingers, you can carry on. How does the diagnosis compare to when you lost the tips of your fingers in a factory accident aged 18 and were told you would never play guitar again? I have had a few low times in my life like everybody has, but that was one that stuck in the head. You automatically wind yourself up saying, “that’s it then”, but that is not always the case. I need to be at home more and I need to pay more attention to my friends and family. I have to live what life I’ve got because I have been on the road nearly 50 years. It really did change my life as far as what I have to do now. I was knocked for six when the doctors told me that it was, that it was stage III cancer. How has it changed your perspective on life? The doctors found a lump there and we don’t know if it is cancer or what, but I feel OK at the moment. When I get back to England, I have to have an operation to remove this thing at the back of my nose.
I went for a check four weeks ago and the doctor said that at the moment there is no activity where I had the cancer before, but there is activity in the throat.