When Black Sabbath concluded their final tour, “The End,” in February of 2017 in Birmingham, it seemingly marked the close of a 49-year, Rock and Roll Hall of Fame-worthy career. But as is the case with most bands claiming their careers have reached the finale, guitarist Tony Iommi has left the door open for potential Black Sabbath shows in the future.
“You can never say never, can you?,” Iommi told Planet Rock. “We’ve known in this band you can never say, ‘That’s never gonna happen again,’ because every time we said that, it has. We never thought we’d get back with Ozzy after the early years. We never thought we’d get back with Dio again; we did. We never thought we’d have Ian Gillan in the band, but we did. So you just can’t say it’s never gonna happen.”
Iommi put Sabbath’s end down to the fact that he can no longer tour for extended periods of time. “The problem is in a band of this size, you can’t just go and go a week of gigs; you’ve gotta do a world tour of 18 months,” Iommi said. “And when you do that, you have to take that on. When you first mention it, about going out on tour, ‘Yeah. Brilliant. 18-month tour. Fantastic.’ But when you get into a year of it, you get tired. But you have to take it on that long ’cause you’ve got all the crew to keep alive. Everybody’s got a job, so you can’t do one week and then have a month off and do another week, ’cause you won’t get the crew; they wanna have a job. So we’ve done it for that long — we’ve done a world tour and a world tour again. And then it was getting sort of tiring.”
Iommi was diagnosed with blood cancer in 2012, and doctors recommended he stop touring of any kind of large magnitude. “When I was talking to my doctors, they said, ‘You shouldn’t really be doing it to that extent, flying,’ ‘cause I’ve got blood cancer. It wasn’t good for me to be doing that much flying. I talked to the guys and I said, ‘It’s probably the time to call it a day now, sort of thing, for now’ of that extensive touring.” Still, Iommi said Black Sabbath has not ruled out performing again. “We haven’t stopped it,” he said. “It’s just the major touring that has come to a stop; I wouldn’t wanna do 18-month tours again. But that doesn’t say we wouldn’t do any one-off stuff.”
Black Sabbath released “13” in 2013, marking the first album in 35 years to feature Ozzy Osbourne, Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler. Drummer Bill Ward didn’t take part in the reunion due to contractual disputes.
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