Black Sabbath formed over 50 years ago and played their final show in their home town of Birmingham back in 2017. Lead singer Ozzy Osbourne is still performing solo, with his first studio album in a decade – Ordinary Man – releasing later this month. Now the 71-year-old, who recently disclosed he’s been diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, has revealed how Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi still intimates him.
Ozzy continued: “And actually, to this day, I still don’t understand how he plays guitar, ’cause he’s got no fingertips; he plays with plastic fingers.”
“I mean, there is a man. When [Tony] got diagnosed with cancer, he just dealt with it. That’s him.
“I’m going [imitates crying sound], and he’s, like, ‘Whatever I have to do.’
“He’s like that. He’s always been like that. Very calm.”
But it was here that the Black Sabbath singer admitted his nervousness around Iommi.
Ozzy said: “It’s just fear, I suppose.
“‘Cause Tony, he’s one of the few people who could walk into this room right now and I would f***king feel intimidated.
“He intimidates the f*** out of me — and he knows it.”
Express.co.uk had the honour of interviewing Iommi a couple of years ago and we can say he was actually pretty gentle and charming in our opinion.
On Black Sabbath’s final tour The End, he said: “I loved the whole tour. Really enjoyable. But one of the problems was we used to be altogether all the time. As the years have gone by everybody has their own space and schedule.
“We all travelled together on the plane, but then everybody gets into their individual cars, goes to the hotel, goes to their room. So you didn’t see anybody. We’d lost that sort of comradeship. We used to go down to the bar and have a drink, but everyone stopped drinking apart from me.
“We weren’t able to sit down and talk about anything. [Although] Ozzy would sometimes come into my dressing room. He’d say a few words and then he’d go.” Maybe because he was so intimated for some reason?
