In a recent interview posted to Tony Iommi’s YouTube account, Iommi and Tony Martin have discussed the pranks they played on each other while on tour with Black Sabbath. They mention a particular prank, which included Iommi dressing up one of his guitar techs as him and sending the fake Iommi out on stage.
“They must have planned it for weeks. I was not expecting that, ’cos I’m being all serious, like I said ‘Mr. Tony Iommi’ and then walks Andy [on stage],” said Martin.
Iommi continued, “Obviously he’d seen how I walk, and he got it all off to a tee. He wore one of my jackets, put a wig on, mustache…goes out and I’m playing behind him. I’m playing the stack and he’s out the front, and nobody sussed it was him first.”
Martin relates how he turned around, noticed that “guitar’s on the wrong way round” and realized it wasn’t Iommi after all.
Besides the well-thought-out pranks, life in Black Sabbath wasn’t short of amusing mishaps – one of them even inspired the 1984 cult classic This Is Spinal Tap. In his 2011 memoir Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath, Iommi explained how the band ordered a ‘Stonehenge’ set for the stage.
“When we were thinking about the stage set for our Born Again tour, Geezer [Butler, Sabbath’s bass guitar player] said: ‘Why don’t we have something that looks like Stonehenge, you know, with stones and all that stuff?’
“Geezer jotted down what it should look like and gave it to the designers. Two or three months later we saw it. We rehearsed for the tour at the Birmingham NEC and we said: ‘Oh great, the stage set is going to come today!’”
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“It came in and we couldn’t believe it. It was as big as the real Stonehenge,” Iommi remembers. “They had taken Geezer’s measurements the wrong way and thought it was meant to be life-size. I said, ‘How the bloody hell did that happen?’”
This mishap became a source of inspiration for the now-iconic Stonehenge scene in Spinal Tap.
The Tony Martin-Tony Iommi interview celebrates the long-awaited Martin-era box set, Black Sabbath: Anno Domini 1989-1995, which will be released on May 31. It is available to pre-order now.
