(Credits: TIDAL)
Fri 23 January 2026 4:00, UK
Back in 2000, Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi released what, at the time, felt like the biggest single statement he’d made as an artist.
Titled simply IOMMI, it was his first-ever solo album, five years in the making and chock-full of younger musicians who’d grown up admiring his work, including Billy Corgan, Dave Grohl, and Serj Tankian. The finished product could be accused of having a few too many cooks in the kitchen, as Iommi was sharing songwriting duties with many of his guests, but it was still a worthy listen; unfortunately, the record-buying public didn’t get the memo, and IOMMI topped out at number 129 on the US Billboard chart.
“Two embarrassing things that I didn’t go for,” Iommi told Guitarist magazine when looking back on the album 20 years later, “was where they said, ‘This chap wants to do something [with you]: Eminem’. ‘Who the bloody hell is Eminem?’ I didn’t know, and I went, ‘Oh, no’. And Kid Rock… So I turned a few people down that became quite big later, but I hadn’t the faintest idea.”
Having turn-of-the-century Eminem and Kid Rock on IOMMI certainly would have improved its mainstream visibility at the time, but presuming any good songs would have come out of those collaborations is a whole other issue.
Oversights aside, Iommi has usually been quite receptive to jamming with his acolytes, but he still has heroes of his own that he’s never had the chance to record with. Specifically, when you’ve already been in a band with the likes of Ozzy Osbourne, Ronnie James Dio, and Ian Gillan, there’s really only arguable rung left to go on that ladder: Robert Anthony Plant.
Robert Plant in 2025 on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert. (Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
“I’d tried to do [a project] before with Planty and a few others,” Iommi said in 2020, “But it was so hard because of management and all that”.
While Led Zeppelin and Black Sabbath are often viewed as the cornerstone bands of hard rock and metal, they also seem to occupy their own narrative spaces, existing as parallel lines in the 1970s rather than some sort of joint force for good (or evil), but as Iommi often said, relations between the two bands were quite good.
“Black Sabbath used to jam with Led Zeppelin all the time,” he told Sirius Radio in the 2000s. “We’d be trying to rehearse, and they’d come interrupt us. I’ve got some tapes floating around the house”.
On one specific occasion, Iommi recounted to Classic Rock, “We were recording in Morgan Studios in London, and John [Bonham] came down to see us. He brought Planty and John Paul Jones—Jimmy Page was the only one who wasn’t there. They came in, and John’s going, ‘Let’s play ‘Supernaut’,’ ’cause he loved that song. So he sat behind the kit, and we started to play it. Of course, he didn’t play it right, but we just carried on and went into a jam.”
Iommi’s respect for Led Zeppelin and Plant never faded, such that in 2025, he personally reached out to Plant and invited him to perform at the Black Sabbath farewell concert in Birmingham, but he politely declined, later telling Mojo magazine his rationale: “I said, ‘Tony, I’d love to come, but I can’t come. I just can’t. I’m not saying that I’d rather hang out with Peter Gabriel or Youssou N’Dour, but I don’t know anything about what’s going on in that world now, at all’.”
This presumably doesn’t bode well for the long-awaited Iommi-Plant collaboration, unless Tony is willing to convert to country-folk.
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