Tony Iommi Talks About The Final Tour of Black Sabbath, Saying You Can Never Say Never
The co-founder of Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi has just appeared in an interview, talking about the final tour of Black Sabbath, “The End,” along with reflecting how they felt, and many more.
Promoting their latest and final album, the regarded band Black Sabbath also went on a tour, called The End Tour, after their final album was released on 20 January 2016. The End Tour was the regarded heavy metal band’s final concert tour, as it featured Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, and Geezer Butler. In addition, also Tommy Clufetos played drums, replacing the band’s original drummer, Bill Ward, along with keyboardist and guitarist Adam Wakeman.
After wandering across North America, Europe, Oceania, and South America, the final tour of Black Sabbath wrapped up its over-four-decade career, grossing a total of $84.8 million. As there had been 81 shows performed, the final show took place on 4 February 2017, in the band’s home city of Birmingham, England, along with being documented as a concert film, Black Sabbath: The End of the End. Also, the songs of the final show were released as a live album, The End: Live in Birmingham, as well. Ultimately, The End Tour of Black Sabbath was accompanied by the release of an exclusive EP, The End, which contains leftover tracks from their final album “13” sessions, and live tracks recorded on tour between 2013 and 2014.
So although some disagreements the admired band members had gone through, they surely managed to achieve so many great things together as well. And the talented and beloved guitarist Tony Iommi talked about those acrid days, during his latest interview. Black Sabbath co-founder started to answer, saying “You can never say never, can you?” after he was asked “that’s really it” for Black Sabbath.
“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 in the early years. We never thought we’d get back with 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.
“It was emotional, the last year because we’d done it so long together, and it just felt pretty weird, really. It was basically my fault to end it because of the touring,” Iommi continued, reflecting his feelings.
“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,” Tony Iommi continued explaining.
“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 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 explained.
But still, the talented musician also added that they actually haven’t stopped performing entirely, after all. Black Sabbath co-founder continued explaining,
“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.”
The guitarist of Black Sabbath, Tony Iommi also appeared in another interview earlier, where he revealed his excitement for remixing his band’s album Born Again, for its future release. You may find out more about the upcoming master tapes here if you are interested.
