Free Iron Man by Tony Iommi Page B

wasn’t a lot to mix anyway; it was recorded on just four tracks, it didn’t have hundreds of drums on it or overdubs, so it was really very basic. Rodger Bain and Tom Allom did add the bells and the thunder and lightning at the beginning of Black Sabbath . One of them got some sound-effect tapes and said: ‘What about putting these on it?’
    We went: ‘Oh yeah, that’s great!’

    Because it is, it really sets the mood for that track.
    We didn’t have anything to do with the cover art. The photo was taken at the Mapledurham Watermill. We weren’t there when it was taken, but we did meet the girl featured in the picture. She came to a gig once and introduced herself. I thought it was a good cover, really different. But inside the gatefold sleeve you have the inverted cross, which opened all sorts of cans of worms for us. We were suddenly satanic then.
    But most of the excitement we felt at the time had nothing to do with that. We were just happy to have an album.

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    Now under new management
    The record company switched us from Fontana to one of their other labels, Vertigo Records. They pushed it more because it was a new label with more progressive acts. But we didn’t have a lot of contact with them; they only wanted to talk to the manager. At least, that’s what we were told. Sometimes you’d see people from the label turn up, but you wouldn’t know who they were.
    The marketing people made sure the album came out on Friday the 13th, February 1970. We did interviews around the release, but that ended after Patrick Meehan took over management from Jim Simpson. He stopped us doing press, because us being unavailable for interviews made it more of a special thing. We hardly had any radio play because the only one who played us was John Peel. Even so the album sold 5,000 copies in the first week after release thanks to underground word of mouth, especially in the places in which we had built up a following by playing live.
    The press hated us, and we got slagged left, right and centre. You obviously get concerned, but it’s not like we thought, oh, we’re going to change the music then. The album was selling, so obviously we’d done something right. We believed in what we did
and we loved it, so there was nothing else we could do apart from carry on with what we were doing.
    Only when grunge became popular, and all those musicians said that Black Sabbath was a great influence, did we become the flavour of the month, or flavour of the time. So here we were, reading good things about ourselves, going: ‘Hang on, what happened? They can’t write good things!’ Because we always said: ‘As soon as they start writing good things about us, we better give up.’
    The single ‘Evil Woman’ didn’t do much, but the album went to No. 8. Jim Simpson had booked us a lot of gigs before it came out and we were still honouring them for something like £20, next to nothing. We said to him: ‘Hang on, how many more of these gigs are we going to be doing?’
    â€˜Oh, we’ve got months of these to go.’
    It was getting silly. Even the people who ran the clubs we played at were going: ‘You should be getting more than this! What are you doing playing here?’
    We thought, well, fuck this, we’ve done enough! So when heavyweight manager Don Arden called, telling us he was interested in working with us, we went up to London to see him. Wilf Pine picked us up in a Rolls-Royce. Wilf was a nice bloke when you knew him, but, on the other hand, he was quite vicious. Fucking hell, I’ve heard tasty stories about what he did for Don Arden. Everything looked really heavy around Don. You saw lots of gangster-like characters floating about. We got to his office and it was a bit overpowering, with Don going: ‘You’re going to be great. You’re going to have billboards up everywhere. I’m going to get you to the