The Black Sabbath co-founder and guitarist Tony Iommi is currently promoting the band’s new box-set “Anno Domini”, which has the albums the group recorded with Tony Martin on vocals. In an interview with Eddie Trunk, the guitar player also talked about another overlooked era of the group which was with the Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan. Iommi, Geezer Butler, Gillan and Bill Ward recorded the album “Born Again” in 1983 and since then the record has had mixed reviews.
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Iommi said that he would like to remix that album because at the time the band even tried to stop the album from being released because they really didn’t like the final result. He said that everything was sounding great and they left to tour, but when they came back someone had changed a lot of things and the record was really sounding worse.
Tony Iommi recalls why Black Sabbath tried to stop “Born Again” from being released in 1983
“It’s funny how that works. Later on, a new generation comes in and then people get to hear, the original fans will hear it and go, ‘Oh, yeah. I forgot about that record.’ It is funny how it all works, but it’s great. It’s great that it does.”
“That’s why I’d like to present (“Born Again”) that again. Have a look at that and see what we can do with it. Because I know we weren’t very happy with the sound.”
He continued:
“But a lot of people accepted the sound, really. Certainly now. At the time, it was, ‘Oh my God.’ Because we went on tour, left it to somebody else. When we heard it, we nearly had a fit. It was in the top — I think it was No. 4 in England at the time.”
“And we tried to stop it (from being released), but it was too late by the time we’d heard it. And it just sounded really muffly. It was nothing like when we left before we went on tour. So it would be nice to get it so we can get a better sound on it, really. There really are some great songs on that album. There really are,” Tony Iommi said.
Some of the most famous tracks from “Born Again”, besides the title-track, are “Trashed”, “Disturbing The Priest” and “Zero The Hero”.
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