Into the void, p.1
Into the Void, page 1
Dedication
Dedicated to the memory of James and Mary Butler.
Thank you to the fans and followers, without whom my life would be very different.
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
1. All the Sevens
2. Jesus, Mary, and Joseph
3. Something at the Door
4. Premonition
5. America Calling
6. The Strain
7. Blood, Sweat, and Fears
8. Between Heaven and Hell
9. The Mob Rules
10. Tomorrow Never Knows
11. Bouncing Around
12. So Low
13. Beginning of the End
Epilogue
Author’s Note
Acknowledgements
Photo Section
About the Author
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
A friend recently sent me a crumpled, dog-eared black-and-white photo of my first-ever gig. The year is 1965, the venue is the parochial hall in Erdington and I’m striking a John Lennon pose while strumming my beautiful red Hofner Colorama guitar.
The kid in the photo is now in his seventies. The hair is now white and the Hofner Colorama is probably in an antique shop somewhere, or rusting away in some old pal’s loft. Sixty years gone in the blink of an eye. How the hell did that happen? When I look back at how it played out, it’s almost inconceivable.
When you’re in a rock and roll band for as long I was, there tends to be a lot of drama. If you were in a rock and roll band back in the seventies and eighties, the drama was turned up to 11. Being in Black Sabbath felt like being an actor in a soap opera.
It’s a minor miracle all four of the original lineup survived beyond the 1970s, let alone that we’re all still here. Along the way, we consumed enough booze and drugs to sink a battleship. Music writers spent decades trying to tear us down. There were so many lineup changes I sometimes didn’t know what band I was supposed to be in. We made millions, lost it all and had to go back to the well and make it all again. Some records were great and sold by the truckload, others not so much. We brought the house down everywhere from Lichfield, Staffordshire, to Auckland, New Zealand, but occasionally descended into Spinal Tap levels of farce. Bandmates said and did horrible things to each other—some of it almost criminal—and fought like wounded animals.
But when Sabbath were firing on all cylinders, which was most of the time, there was no better feeling. There was Ozzy looking like a madman while singing and clapping, like only he could do; Tony launching into another monstrous riff; Bill keeping the band swinging; me, making my bass rumble. Four childhood friends from a working-class neighborhood who became as close as brothers, doing what most people would cut off their right arms to do (unless you were a musician). Four dreamers who were written off from the start, sticking it to the critics and driving millions of fans crazy.
That’s why every time I went onstage, right down to the very last gig, I was still that happy kid from the black-and-white photo. Despite all the aggravation that came with it, there was still no better way to make a living. I bet you can’t think of one. Rocket engines burning fuel so fast, up into the night sky they blast. That’s Black Sabbath to a tee—although only a madman would have predicted the fuel would last as long as it did.
1
All the Sevens
ASTON
When I was six, circa 1955, I had a visit from the future.
There I was, tucked up in bed, when I was awoken by a strange glow. I opened my eyes and saw a spinning sphere, hovering right above my head. Now from darkness, there springs light.
I stared into the sphere and saw a man on a stage. He had long hair, silver boots and was playing a guitar. The only stage I’d ever seen was at school, and that was used for Nativity plays. I had no idea what a guitar looked like, let alone a guitar being played by a man with long hair and silver boots. We didn’t have a television in those days, and newspapers in England weren’t exactly full of pop stars.
The sphere hovered for maybe a minute, before ducking into the bedroom fireplace and disappearing up the chimney. It sounds like a nightmare, and I suppose it would scare the hell out of some kids, but it didn’t seem that strange to me. It didn’t take me long to go back to sleep.
You might be thinking, Blimey, I thought Geezer was meant to be the sensible one in Black Sabbath. How could a working-class kid from Birmingham have a vision that he was destined to be a rock star, when rock stars didn’t even exist in the 1950s? Well, that’s exactly what I saw. And not just the once.
When I awoke hours later, the house was silent and still. The heated brick I used instead of a hot water bottle was no longer wrapped in a towel and was like a block of ice against my feet (in case you were wondering, my mom would heat a brick or piece of iron in the oven, wrap it in a rag or towel and place it in my bed to warm it up, since there was no central heating in the house—if the towel came loose just after you popped it under your blanket, you’d scald your feet and wake up screaming). Wallpaper, loosened by damp, was peeling from the wall next to my bed. I had bites from bedbugs, which would appear from nowhere in the middle of the night, like a tiny ambushing army. Whenever I squashed one, my blood would splash against the wall, and we were constantly battling those little bleeders with an insecticide called Flit, which probably did us more harm than them. Pretty grim, really. But judging by that sphere, the future looked quite promising. Whatever the hell it meant.
Hovering spheres and mysterious rock star dreams aside, growing up in postwar Birmingham was gritty. Aston, the inner-city district where we lived, was still recovering from the battering it took in World War II. The Luftwaffe had paid a lot of attention to Birmingham. Our house, 88 Victoria Road, was a few miles from the big Spitfire factory in Castle Bromwich, as well as the ICI and Kynoch factories, where chemicals and ammunition were manufactured. One bomb damaged the roof of our house, but that was a lucky escape. It landed on the corner of Victoria Road, obliterating two houses and a shop.
I was born in the front bedroom of that house, on July 17, 1949. In that same bedroom twenty years later, I’d awake with the lyrics and bass riff for “Behind the Wall of Sleep” rolling around my head. That song ended up on Black Sabbath’s first album.
I was the seventh child of a seventh child, born on the seventeenth day of the seventh month, 1949, at seven minutes to midnight. The day after I arrived, my sister Eileen tried to throw me out of the bedroom window. She was five and had been the baby of the family until then, so it was a fit of jealous rage. God knows what she might have done if Mom had had any more.
My father, James, and mother, Mary, were originally from Dublin, Ireland, where my sister Maura and brothers James and Patrick were also born. My eldest sister, Sheila, was born in Aldershot, where Dad had been stationed with the British Army, while Eileen and my brother Peter were born in Aston, like me.
Dad ran away from home when he was fifteen. His father was terribly strict and would administer beatings at the drop of a hat. Dad joined the Royal Scots Regiment at eighteen and saw service in India and Egypt in the 1920s and early 1930s, before settling in Aston. Dad was an intelligent man who had seen an awful lot—the Irish uprising in 1916, the British Army’s “invasion” of Ireland, military service and during his stint as an auxiliary firefighter in World War II. He could talk at length about any topic, especially about history and geography. But there weren’t a lot of opportunities for working-class veterans like him, however heroic and bright. So Dad ended up working for an engineering company called Tube Investments, packing steel tubes for worldwide export.
Dad worked his fingers to the bone. Every day, he’d come home from work utterly worn out, eat his supper and retreat to bed before eight o’clock. In thirty years, the only time he took time off work was when a duodenal ulcer burst and he was rushed to hospital. After twenty-five years of service, Tube Investments presented Dad with a gold watch. It wasn’t a Rolex, but it was expensive enough. Dad thought it was far too ostentatious and never wore it.
Mom (in Aston it was always “Mom” rather than “Mum”) was the seventh of nine children who grew up poor in Dublin, under the tyranny of the British Army and Black and Tans that terrorized Ireland’s residents. On leaving school, she became a children’s nanny, before marrying Dad in 1929. Mom was an incredible woman who kept the house spotless and was always cooking. She didn’t have a choice, what with all those mouths to feed. Before coal became widely available, Mom would take me in a pram to the local gasworks, about two miles away, fill up a sack with coke (no, not the drink or nose powder), remove me from the pram, replace me with the sack and carry me home. There was never much money, but none of us ever missed a meal and Mom always made sure we had new clothes and kept ourselves clean and tidy.
Like Dad, Mom never drank alcohol and was a creature of routine and iron discipline. Every Friday, Mom would clean all the windows in the house, two of which I broke in one week by kicking a football through them. I can still feel the sting of Dad’s leather belt, which he would administer when I got too naughty. Mom stood no nonsense either: one day, I came home crying because a bigger kid had beaten me up, and she sent me back out with the instructions to “give him a good hiding.” I did exactly that, which gained me respect from the local kids.
Mom only punished me once, with a cane she kept in case any of us got out of hand. But that’s just how it was back then—if your mom hit you, you’d understand why. You certainly wouldn’t question it. I couldn’t have asked for better parents. They gave me an incredibly loving, happy childhood.
Aston was a very working-class area, mainly comprised of Victorian terraced and back-to-back houses. Life was probably more Dickensian than modern times. Milk and bread were delivered by a horse and cart (there were few cars on the streets of Aston, and very few bicycles). The bread would be hot and crusty by the time it arrived at our house—I’ve never tasted bread as good as that since. Because Britain was still recovering from the war, other food was rationed until 1954, when I was five. But when you’ve never had treats, like chocolate, sweets, and all the things that kids take for granted today, you can’t possibly miss them.
Until my late teens, occasional day trips and holidays in Dublin were almost the only times I left Aston. Aston was almost my entire world, but that was fine by me. Because no-one had much, we all looked out for each other, and there was no looking over the garden fence. Aston was a thriving part of Birmingham, with a great library, a park, sports fields, several churches and schools, plenty of pubs, shops and cinemas. My first film was Invaders from Mars, which my mom took me to see at the local flicks and is still one of my favourites. I’d go and watch Flash Gordon serials every week—no wonder I was so fascinated by anything to do with space.
The Aston Hippodrome had played host to lots of big stars, including Laurel and Hardy and Judy Garland. We even had a magnificent seventeenth-century mansion called Aston Hall, which was home of the Holte family and attacked by Parliamentary troops during the English Civil War. Somehow, the Luftwaffe missed it. The great American man of letters Washington Irving stayed at the hall in 1821, which is when he wrote Bracebridge Hall.
More important, there was plenty of work in Aston, including in the famous HP Sauce factory and Ansells Brewery. Aston wasn’t glamorous, and it was certainly rough at times, but it had everything you could wish for. I feel very lucky to have grown up there.
Our house would have been quite roomy if there hadn’t been eight people living in it, Sheila having married and moved out in 1951. My three brothers slept in the front bedroom, my mom and two sisters in the middle bedroom and me and my dad in the back bedroom. We had no telephone, hot water or bathroom. The only electrical outlets were downstairs. We still had the original Victorian fireplace, which must have been eighty years old. It was a big, black cast-iron thing with ovens on either side, in which we’d roast chestnuts, bake potatoes and puddings. We had a decent-size yard, a place to store coal and a room where the previous Victorian residents would have stored food for their horse. I’d play in there when it was raining, among all the junk. Occasionally, I’d discover a picture of a naked woman, presumably hidden there by one of my brothers. If Mom or Dad had discovered them, they would have dropped down dead with shock.
Bath time was once a week. A tin bath would be dragged in from the yard and water heated on the gas stove and copper boiler. When we were younger, us kids would take our baths in front of the fire in the living room. When we got older, we’d take them in the kitchen, where there was more privacy. At least in theory. One evening, my sister Maura was taking a bath when one of my marbles got stuck under the kitchen door. As I was retrieving it, I saw her getting out of the bath. And when she returned to the living room, dried and clothed, I asked her why she had a brush between her legs. Well, I was only six.
We were lucky enough to have our own outside toilet, but some of our neighbors had to share one. When I learned that some people had an indoor toilet, I was disgusted: You mean to tell me that people do number twos inside their house? Not that having our own toilet was much of a luxury, because it was bloody freezing in the winter. And we didn’t have toilet paper. Instead, we’d use a newspaper . . . after everyone had read it. On Saturdays, the local football paper (“soccer” to you Americans) was pink and seemed slightly softer. That made Sunday the best time to empty one’s bowels. If there was a picture of a Birmingham City or West Brom player to wipe your arse on, even better.
AVFC
If you were from Aston back then, you supported Aston Villa Football Club. No ifs or buts. No supporting Manchester United, Liverpool or Chelsea, like some kids from Aston do nowadays, just because they’ve got more money and win stuff. And you certainly didn’t support Birmingham City, who were the dreaded “scum” from the wrong side of town. I’ve got to hand it to their supporters, they stick with their club through thick and thin. And it’s mainly been thin. I’d go as far as to say that that team are a disgrace to the city.
For those who don’t know much about football, here’s a brief lesson: Villa were a powerhouse in the early years of the organized game in England, winning six league titles and six FA Cups between 1886 and 1920. Queen Victoria was said to be a fan, as is Prince William now. By the time I came along, Villa still held the record for the number of FA Cup wins and were one of only two teams to have won the league and cup in the same season. They were like a second religion to me, after Catholicism. Nowadays, they’re my only religion.
From our house, I could hear the roar of Villa Park’s Holte End, which in those days was an uncovered terrace and held about twenty thousand fans. Hearing that kind of noise on a weekly basis had a profound effect on a small child. I also remember floodlights being installed in the 1950s and how they cast a glow over the entire neighborhood, like a spaceship parked at the bottom of the street. When Villa played at home, I’d kick a ball around with our border collie Scamp in the backyard. And whenever Villa scored and that great roar came rolling over, like a tidal wave, I’d pretend they were cheering for me.
In 1957, when I was seven, Villa reached the FA Cup final, and Dad went out and bought a tiny black-and-white TV set so we could all watch it. Villa were given absolutely no chance, because our opponents, Manchester United, had just romped to the league title and their star man, Duncan Edwards, was like the David Beckham of the era. That TV set was money well spent, because Villa won 2–1 to claim the trophy for a record seventh time (there’s that special number seven again!), courtesy of two goals from my hero Peter McParland.
My sister was in bed with tonsillitis that day, so Mom sent me to the shop to get her some Lucozade and a tube of Smarties (in the UK in those days, people thought Lucozade, a golden-colored fizzy drink, was some magical cure-all). But instead of giving the goodies to my sister, I kept them for myself. Every cup final since, I’ve watched it with Lucozade and Smarties (well, the vegan variety).
From the age of seven, I was allowed to go to matches on my own, or with a friend or two. It was only one shilling (five pence) to get into the Holte End. And if I didn’t have a shilling, I’d sneak in for free at halftime. On the final whistle, I’d jump over the little fence behind the goal, wade through the thick, sticky mud (how they played in that mud I do not know) and slap Peter McParland on the back. I bet poor old Peter couldn’t wait to get away from me.
In those early days, there was no crowd segregation, so you could stand with away supporters and exchange a bit of banter with no trouble. But things started getting dangerous in the 1960s. Manchester United supporters were the first to gain a reputation for violence. After we beat them in the ’57 cup final, they’d turn up to Villa Park wearing “We Hate Villa” badges. One Saturday afternoon, I was in my usual spot behind the goal when I noticed hundreds of United supporters making their way to the Holte End. And a few minutes after kickoff, the bloke next to me collapsed, with blood gushing from his head. He’d been hit by a flying beer bottle. Suddenly, bottles started raining down and Villa supporters were dropping like flies. The police quickly moved in, but that night’s local newspaper headlines were all about the disgraceful behavior of United’s supporters. Football hooliganism had raised its ugly head and has never really gone away. Then there was the time we played Nottingham Forest. Before kickoff, Forest fans ambushed Villa fans on the Trent Bridge and started tossing them into the river. Mercifully, I managed to avoid a dunking and slip into the ground after the match had started.
Two years after winning the FA Cup for the seventh time, Villa were relegated from Division One, as the Premier League was called then. I’d been to the pictures with Dad and when we got home, the news of Villa’s relegation was on the radio. I burst into tears and didn’t stop sobbing until the morning. But the worst thing to happen to me, Villa-wise, didn’t involve a beating or a relegation. I can still remember the date: November 14, 1959. Villa were playing Charlton Athletic and I was to pick up my friend Francis Egan on the way to the ground. As we were about to leave Francis’s house, his dad called us inside and said, “Why don’t you save your shilling and help me paint the living room?” I couldn’t believe my ears. Miss a Villa game? Miss the chance of seeing Peter McParland and Gerry Hitchens, my heroes, run riot? No chance. However, Francis’s dad insisted it was going to be a dull game anyway, maybe even a 0–0 draw, and told us that he was doing us a favor. I could see where this was going. If we disobeyed him, he’d probably ban me from seeing my best friend and then give Francis a beating. So I very reluctantly agreed.
