Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath bassist Terence “Geezer” Butler recalls the last time his band toured Australia, a memory from nearly 40 years back, though it’s a tale that lacks the ever-enticing rock star antics one would envisage from a band of Sabbath’s calibre.

“Last time I was there I had pneumonia, so I was only allowed out of the hotel to play the gigs,” recalls Butler.

“The doctor had told me to rest up, but I wasn’t coming all the way to Australia to just stay in bed!” he says. “I do remember a park I went to in Sydney where there were lots of fruit bats in the trees. I loved that!”

Returning to Australia for the first time since 1974 to perform a series of dates in April and early May, Black Sabbath are the legendary English band credited with pioneering heavy metal, and nearly half a century after their formation, with their 19th album due for release in June this year, Sabbath are proving the legacy is not over yet.

Hearing of their earliest musical experiences however makes it clear it wasn’t always apparent that Sabbath would be the ultimate forgers of the “satanic blues,” they now so proudly claim to create. “The doctor had told me to rest up, but I wasn’t coming all the way to Australia to just stay in bed!”

The first gig Butler ever played was, “at the local church hall, when I was 15. I was in a band called The Ruums, and we did lots of Beatles, Stones, and Kinks covers,” he unveils.

Humble pop-rock cover band they may have once been, but playing a seemingly lame gig at a birthday party afforded Butler tickets to his first concert ever, The Beatles at Birmingham Odeon, a cinema in England’s mid-west.

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“The manager of the venue was the mother of the girl whose birthday party The Ruums played at, so a ticket was our fee,” Butler regales proudly.

However, the more indulgent rock star tales are also present as Butler remembers tours past, travelling around in an “old van with a big hole in the floor,” sleeping in the same room as other Sabbath members, or with, “whatever girls we’d meet – we’d all pile into their place.”

But removing the romantic, rose coloured, rock-star glasses, Butler says these days there’s “no partying all night like we used to,” and notes other changes to the concert experience for Sabbath.

“Well, obviously the places we play at are larger than when we started, and now we have to get more rest before a gig…I still love playing the music though – that has never changed.”

It’s this unrelenting dogma, and life long commitment to music and performance that is partly behind the classic lineup’s recent reunion, but also central to a band whose name has long preceded them, and a group whose frontman – the notorious Prince of Darkness, Ozzy Osbourne – precedes almost every social convention.

Amongst other accolades, Black Sabbath were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame (by Metallica) in 2006, and have been ranked by MTV as the “Greatest Metal Band”.

But their reformation, new ’35 years in the making’ album 13, and subsequent tour plans were hardly a smooth or romantic undertaking, with only three of the those original four members (now senior citizens – Osbourne 63, guitarist Tony Iommi 64, and Butler 62) destined to make the trip to Australia.

Drummer Bill Ward is absent from the lineup; a result of contractual demands that could not be met by the band, and which bass player and primary lyricist Geezer Butler told NME last year were so “unrealistic,” as to be considered, “a joke.”

When asked if he’d been touch with his old bandmate, Butler replies that the “situation was totally out of my hands.”

“Bill is very hard to contact, since he doesn’t use the internet, and I have a phone phobia, so I have to go through his secretary when I want to say anything to him,” says Butler.

So it’s Brad Wilk of Rage Against the Machine and Audioslave who stepped up to fill Ward’s place on the recording of the new album.

It has however, been confirmed that Wilk will not to be joining Black Sabbath on tour. Butler had little to say of the Rage drummer’s involvement with the band, simply replying to questions surrounding his potential presence on the tour with, “I don’t get involved in that side of things.”

He proceeds to move the conversation along swiftly when asked about the drummer’s influence on the sound of the new album. “Well, we are getting a bit old now, so I’ll be happy if this album and tour cycle is our last. I’ll have achieved my life’s ambition of finishing it all with a new Sabbath album.”

13’s sound was however, likely refined and polished by chosen producer Rick Rubin, the co-president of Columbia Records, and founder of both Def Jam and American Records.

Rubin worked closely with Wilk in his Audioslave days, and was the catalyst for his appearance on the forthcoming Sabbath album.

Butler says of the selection, “he [Rubin] wanted someone with the same approach Bill had. Brad fitted right in after a few days rehearsing. He was very nervous at first, but soon got into it.”

Long before Sabbath, Rubin has also worked alongside a hugely diverse range of acts during his own long and fruitful career, from Slipknot, The Mars Volta and Aerosmith, right on through to Tom Petty and The Dixie Chicks.

But despite Rubin’s glowing credentials, Butler admits, “it’s been a while since we had a producer on board.”

Furthermore, Butler says that sonically, 13 is best positioned alongside the band’s “first three albums,” which were all recorded live in the studio, “one a day, until they were all done.”

For their latest, it was a matter of trying “to capture the live feel that those albums had,” Butler confessed.

Black Sabbath, Paranoid, and Master of Reality were the three albums recorded “in a matter of days, but over the years we got more and more involved in the studio, until eventually we were taking months and months to record an album,” explains the bassist.

Yet from the more than 170-song catalogue they’ve fashioned over the decades – with the participation of producers or otherwise – Butler says that few tracks from 13 will feature in their live shows, as “the fans won’t be familiar with the new stuff.”

Though, “we are planning on at least two for now,” he reveals of the band’s forthcoming Australian Tour.

There’ll be fewer vans and holes-in-floor occasions for their 2013 tour, with Butler, Osbourne, and Iommi arriving in a private jet, staying in “better hotels,” or, as Butler suggests more quietly, “at least the ones Ozzy hasn’t been banned from.”

So does the reunion and current world tour indicate the advent of more Black Sabbath material, or a permanent reformation? Probably not, says Butler, but the bassist is considerably satisfied with the band’s current undertaking.

“Well, we are getting a bit old now, so I’ll be happy if this album and tour cycle is our last. I’ll have achieved my life’s ambition of finishing it all with a new Sabbath album.”

Perhaps it’s this humility that extends to Butler’s sentiments about the modern metal scene, and the unquestionably powerful influence Black Sabbath have had on the sound of bands all around the world.

That, or apathy and a glimmer of fatigue; “I don’t really listen to much metal these days,” he says. “I think Mastodon was the last metal album I bought. I’m not into all the thrash and death metal stuff.” “[Tony Iommi’s] work ethic inspired us all, he said he wouldn’t let the cancer stop him from recording this album, and he was right.”

Alongside Mastodon, Butler’s own musical preference is assorted, and includes artists like “Band Of Skulls, Richard Hawley, June Tabor, Alison Kraus, Coldplay, and Alabama Shakes – anything but rap,” he adds at a clip.

But as one would expect from a career that’s spanned half a lifetime, the changes the band have endured together are extensive – amongst a variety of other colourful events – Osborne’s dismissal in 1979, the death of guitarist Ronnie James Dio, multiple (around 25) lineup changes since 1969, and more recently,Tony Iommi being diagnosed with cancer in early 2012.

The only constant member of the band since their formation is “doing really well,” according to Butler. “His disease is in remission, but he still has to be treated every six weeks over the next two years.”

Despite being diagnosed just as Sabbath were set to hit the reunion trail, meaning the cancellation of several shows, Butler touchingly discloses the guitarist’s “work ethic inspired us all, he said he wouldn’t let the cancer stop him from recording this album, and he was right.”

So with the album primed for release in just a few months, the tour already underway, including a “healthy” looking, yet “stoically silent,” Iommi, (at least for his 2012 Download Festival performance) the old boys probably won’t be the head-banging, frenetically leaping band they were in the 1970s.

But Black Sabbath plan to present Australian fans a live show worthy of a legacy that is almost unmatched in length and intensity, and certainly a great deal more than frivolous exploits and a passing, youthful enthusiasm they used to be known for.

Black Sabbath’s 13 is expected to drop sometime in June, the band start their