(Credits: Far Out / Warner Bros. Records / YouTube Still)
Fri 12 December 2025 20:00, UK
There are a lot of factors that contributed towards Black Sabbath’s unique sound, but one of the key components was their approach to the tone of a guitar.
When he was writing with Black Sabbath before they were famous, Tony Iommi was also working at a sheet metal factory, given music was hardly paying his bills at this point. During one of his shifts, there was a horrific accident, which led to him losing the tips of his fingers, hardly something that a budding guitarist would wish upon themselves.
“I’d be on a line, and they’d pass stuff down to me, and I’d weld it, and then it’d go to somewhere else,” said Iommi when he was discussing what his role used to be when he worked at the factory. “One day, the person that would be sending me the thing to weld never turned up, so they put me on this giant, huge press — a guillotine-type press.”
He continued, “I don’t know what happened. I must have pushed my hand in. Bang! […] It came down. It just took the ends off [my fingers]. I actually pulled them off. As I pulled my hand back, it sort of pulled them off. It was left with two stalks, the bone was sticking out the top of the finger.”
After losing the tips of his fingers, rather than hanging up his goddamn guitar and breaking hearts everywhere, Iommi instead opted to tune down his six-string, which meant he was still able to bend the strings. It gave the band a doom-laden sound that they would use to create their unique heavy metal style around it. People very much enjoyed this new approach to the guitar, and it showed the damn-near infinite versatility of the instrument. It would only be a few years later that Australian rockers AC/DC got together, who also championed a very specific style of guitar music.
It turns out that the two heavy bands would eventually join forces as they went on tour with one another in Australia. This dynamic wouldn’t last, as Malcolm Young and Geezer Butler ended up clashing; however, Ozzy Osbourne never had anything against the band. Quite the opposite, he turned out to be a huge fan and was blown away by how much energy they put into their guitar-centric music. He was particularly impressed by Angus Young.
“Angus is like a machine that never stops. He keeps going and going. He still got the fucking energy, man, they are a really great bunch of guys,” said Osbourne. “They are my friends, are real people. I love them all, God bless them. (…) There is no other band in the world like them. (They) are a meat and potatoes band. There is no bollocks, there is no fucking around. Whether you like them or you don’t and I’m proud to say I love them.”
Given Ozzy Osbourne was touring with AC/DC during the early instances of their career, he was a big fan of the music that they made with Bon Scott. He acknowledged the great work Brian Johnson did when Scott passed away, but he felt as though the album the band made with Scott, Highway To Hell, was their best. Osbourne was such a massive fan of this record that he said he was borderline addicted to it.
“I love Brian Johnson, but to me, my good friend, the late Bon Scott, was the best singer AC/DC ever had. This album was like an addiction to me,” Osbourne concluded, when discussing Highway To Hell. “Bon Scott was a great singer. I mean, Brian [Johnson] is good. But I prefer Bon.”
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