Tony Iommi says that “the Last thing i want to do is pick up a guitar”

The riffmaster Tony Iommi was asked by Total Guitar magazine what the guitar means to him, 49 years after forming the greatest metal band ever, Black Sabbath.

Read what he said:

“It’s a way of expressing your inner self,” he said. “But I don’t sleep with the guitar now, when I did in the early days, mind! It has always meant something very special to me, and it brought out parts of me that you couldn’t bring out normally from within.

“Being able to write music, being able to play an instrument releases something in you that you wouldn’t normally be able to do… that I wouldn’t normally be able to do. And the guitar did that for me. It taught me a lot, really.

“When I feel like it, I go and play now. And at the moment I’m really far away from it because there’s so many other things going on, the last thing I want to do is pick up a guitar! But when I do pick it up, I really enjoy it. And I liked it when I could sit with the band and come up with ideas and come up with riffs. Or at home I come up with riffs. Then I’m in my element.”

Career

Born 19, February, 1948, Frank Anthony “Tony” Iommi lost while working in a factory as a teenager, the tips of the middle and ring finger of his right hand in an accident. An event which crucially affected his playing style.

He briefly left Black Sabbath’s forerunner, ‘Earth’, in 1968 to join Jethro Tull, after which he returned to Black Sabbath in 1969, recording their self-titled debut album. In 2000, he released his first solo album Iommi, followed by 2005’s Fused, which featured his former bandmate Glenn Hughes. After releasing Fused, he joined Heaven & Hell, which disbanded after Ronnie James Dio’s death in 2010.

Iommi was ranked number 25 in Rolling Stone magazine’s list of the “100 Greatest Guitarists of All Time”.

In 2011, he published his autobiography, entitled Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath.