The Black Sabbath axe-slayer said the "rock is dead" debate has been thrown around for decades and he insisted there will always be an appetite for the genre.(Femalfirst)
The 76-year-old musician told Consequence of Sound: "I don't think rock is going to die. That's been said for years. I mean, how many times I've heard that statement over the past 50-odd years? It's quite a lot, really.
"I think good music is not going to go. There's always going to be a market for it. There are going to be an amount of bands that fall by the wayside — as there always is, there always will be. But there are certain bands that are going to stick out and going to be there. You've got Metallica up there — they're not going to go away. They've got a lot of fans and they've got a great fanbase. There are a lot of bands out there. No, the music is not going to go away."
The 'Paranoid' hitmaker having his say on the debate comes after KISS rocker Gene Simmons recently insisted there have been no true rock artists since 1988, whereas before then there were the likes of Elvis Presley, The Beatles, The Stones and Pink Floyd.
The 74-year-old 'Rock and Roll All Nite' hitmaker said: "The point is, yeah, rock is dead because if we play the game from 1958 until 1988, which is 30 years, you had Elvis, The Beatles, The Stones, Pink Floyd, and on and on and on. And you can go to the heavy part of it, which is Metallica, Maiden, if you want to put KISS in there, that’s fine. AC/DC, on and on and on. Even U2, Prince, Bowie, Eagles. And then you get to disco stuff, and Madonna, and that stuff, and Motown, of course. And then from 1988 until today, who’s the new Beatles?"
Tony Iommi has revealed that he plans to release a box set centered around the Tony Martin era of the band.
"I’ve got a lot of lots and lots and lots of recordings of stuff we’ve done in the past that’s never seen the light of day. I’d like to sort some of that out and put that on some of the albums. We are gradually going through these box sets and then there will be a Tony Martin [era] box set at some point coming out and stuff with Ian Gillan maybe. So, yes, there’ll be other songs added, but it’s never been used for anything.”
“It’s unfortunate that over the years Tony Martin has got buried in all this Ozzy and Dio stuff and everything. There will be a period now where we’ll be able to release the box set with the Tony Martin albums with some good outtakes as well. I’ve already mixed [it] here at home, so that’s all ready to go, but we have to wait until the time is right. We can’t put all these things out together — it would cause confusion.”
To be honest, I’ve got boxes and boxes of stuff that’s probably never been heard. Even I can’t remember it all, it’s just a matter of rolling through it and finding it all — Oh, there’s another song we did with Dio or Tony Martin or Ozzy or whatever.”
Black Sabbath actually started as improvisational, jazz, and blues. What made Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules an altogether different blueprint for heavy metal?
We'd gone through with Ozzy and we had that particular sound at that time and then when Ronnie got involved, we took a different direction of writing. With a different voice, of course, you write differently and it took another path which we were enjoying.
Obviously with this pandemic, it stops a lot of things. I was working before this pandemic at home. I had my engineer [Mike Exeter] come over and we would work at my house putting some stuff down, but in England, there's been a complete lockdown for the last couple of months. For over two months you can't have anybody in your house and you can't mix with anybody — it's very awkward.
I usually rely on my engineer to come in and I can play all night then he records it, but when it comes to doing drums and all the rest of the stuff, I, I'm not very good at that. Uh, so I've got to wait until the lockdown is lifted, then he can come over and we can work and start putting more ideas down. I've got loads and loads of riffs, but again, I have to put them into some kind of order and put them down properly with the drums and bass.
