The last year must have been pretty confusing for Black Sabbath fans. Following the group’s ‘final’ concert in Birmingham last February, guitarist Tony Iommi said the band might actually play again one day, before the group all but confirmed their current status in March. Now, Iommi has again address rumours of a reunion, stating that it’s “highly unlikely” the band will ever play together again.
As Blabbermouth reports, Tony Iommi hosted a charity benefit on Friday to raise money for the same cancer treatment unit where Black Sabbath keyboardist Geoff Nicholls was treated. During the proceedings, Iommi was asked whether or not the band could one day perform again, confirming that the group’s days of touring the world are certainly over.
“It’s highly unlikely, but we may,” Iommi revealed mysteriously. “You can never say never, because we’ve done it… So many times, you say, ‘Oh, that’s it now,’ with different singers and different this and that. And all of a sudden, we’ve ended up playing together again. I would hope we could do some one-offs, but we’ll never tour the world again as we did, because it really is exhausting.”
“People think, ‘What a great life,’ and it is a great life, but it takes its toll on your body,” he continued. “All the traveling at different hours of the day and night. You finish a show at 11 o’clock. What we’d normally do is we’d base ourselves in one place, like New York or wherever we were, and then we’d stay in New York for 10 days, fly out and do a show and fly back in the night.”
“So by the time you get to the hotel, it’s four o’clock or five o’clock [in the morning]. And you can’t sleep. And that’s the difficult part. Even though you travel the best way you can. We had a great plane, we had great hotels – everything was marvelous – but it’s still tiring.”
This news does of course gel with Ozzy Osbourne’s recent announcement that he’s planning to quit touring the world.
“It’s ‘No More Tours,’” he explained to Rolling Stone at the time. “So I’m just not doing world tours anymore. I’m still going to be doing gigs, but I’m not going on tour for six months at a time anymore. I’d like to spend some time at home.”
Check out Tony Iommi’s recent discussion about Black Sabbath:
