Legendary BLACK SABBATH guitarist Tony Iommi was recently asked in a new interview with Planet Rock’s “My Planet Rocks“, if “that’s really it” for the iconic metal band.
Iommi responded (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “You can never say never, can you? We’ve known in this band you can never say, ‘That’s never gonna happen again,’ because every time we said that, it has. We never thought we’d get back with Ozzy [Osbourne after] the early years. We never thought we’d get back with [Ronnie James] Dio again; we did. We never thought we’d have Ian Gillan in the band, but we did. So you just can’t say it’s never gonna happen.”
Iommi also discussed BLACK SABBATH’s “The End” farewell tour, which wrapped up in February 2017 in Birmingham, England. The tour was SABBATH’s final trek due to the fact that Tony cuold no longer travel for extended amounts of time due to his battle with cancer.
“It was emotional, the last year, because we’d done it so long together, and it just felt pretty weird, really,” he said. It was basically my fault to end it because of the touring.
“The problem is in a band of this size, you can’t just go and go a week of gigs; you’ve gotta do a world tour of 18 months,” he explained. “And when you do that, you have to take that on. When you first mention it, about going out on tour, ‘Yeah. Brilliant. 18-month tour. Fantastic.’ But when you get into a year of it, you get tired. But you have to take it on that long ’cause you’ve got all the crew to keep alive. Everybody’s got a job, so you can’t do one week and then have a month off and do another week, ’cause you won’t get the crew; they wanna have a job. So we’ve done it for that long — we’ve done a world tour and a world tour again. And then it was getting sort of tiring. Even though we had our own plane and we [stayed] in the best hotels — everything was perfect — but you still get tired. We’d have a base in New York when we play in that area, so we’d have the plane there fly in. So you get in at three o’clock in the morning and then try to get to bed and sleep. So it was a regular thing like this. We tried to make it as comfortable as possible. It couldn’t get any easier or [more] comfortable, but it still was tiring. And the late nights and stuff. So, when I was talking to my doctors, they said, ‘You shouldn’t really be doing it to that extent, flying,’ ’cause I’ve got blood cancer. It wasn’t good for me to be doing that much flying. I talked to the guys and I said, ‘It’s probably the time to call it a day now, sort of thing, for now’ of that extensive touring. So that’s really what we did. But the stipulation was we had to end up in Birmingham ’cause that’s where we started.”
Iommi also noted that BLACK SABBATH has never ruled out performing again, saying: “We haven’t stopped it. It’s just the major touring that has come to a stop; I wouldn’t wanna do 18-month tours again. But that doesn’t say we wouldn’t do any one-off stuff.”