Metal, Hardcore, Indie, Rock
On Wednesday, July 29, legendary Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi is scheduled to unveil the first elements of his long-awaited new solo album, as per Blabbermouth. On July 29 at 7:30 a.m. PDT, 10:30 a.m. EDT, and 3:30 p.m. BST, Iommi will talk about his new solo songs during a YouTube livestream. Below is a brief sneak peek at Tony‘s next music video.
Tony Iommi is a heavy rock icon whose inventive, detuned, gloomy riffs are thought to have served as a model for hundreds of bands who came after. Tony, a left-hander who was born in Birmingham, England, on February 19, 1948, took up the guitar as a teenager after being influenced by bands like Hank Marvin & The Shadows. Iommi had a terrible accident at a sheet metal shop where a machine cut off the tips of his right hand’s fingers, almost ending his musical career too soon. He thought his days of playing the guitar were over, until a buddy introduced him to Django Reinhardt, a guitarist who lost two fingers in a campfire accident involving a gipsy caravan.
Tony was motivated by this to try the six-string again, attaching soft plastic tips to the tips of his fingers. He performed with a number of blues-based rock groups by 1967, including Polka Tulk (later renamed Earth and then Black Sabbath), which included drummer Bill Ward, singer John “Ozzy” Osbourne, and bassist Terry “Geezer” Butler.
He made his own thimbles out of an old Fairy Liquid bottle and “melted it down, got a hot soldering iron and shaped it like a finger” to protect and extend his injured fingers while playing left-handed. He also cut parts of a leather jacket to cover his new homemade prosthetic, which led to two technical issues. First, he tended to put a lot of pressure on the strings because the thimbles made it difficult for him to feel them. Second, he found light-gauge guitar strings to make bending strings simpler because he had trouble with them. But until Picato Strings started producing light-gauge guitar strings in 1970–1971, Iommi remembers that such strings weren’t produced at the time, so he used banjo strings instead.
