The friendship between Tony Iommi and Glenn Hughes goes back more than 50 years – and Iommi even briefly enlisted the former Trapeze/Deep Purple man into Black Sabbath for 1986’s Seventh Star album. In 20065 they joined forces once again for Iommi’s Fused album – a record that both men counted as among their best, as Classic Rock found out when we met up with them in London.
Like most rock stars of a certain age, Tony Iommi and Glenn Hughes wear their sunglasses indoors: Iommi in his familiar opaque purple lenses, Hughes in pale pink-tinted wraparounds. They have a photo session to do after our chat, and both are dressed like men who haven’t carried their own guitar case in decades. They’re both slim, and sporting black jeans that are so ornate that you’d expect to find a coat of arms sewn into them somewhere.
We’re in a photographer’s studio in south-west London, with Iommi and Hughes rejoicing – and quite rightly – in an album the two of them have made called Fused. It will be released under the Iommi name but it’s a fully fledged band album, with Hughes on vocals and bass and Kenny Aronoff (Bob Seger, Alice Cooper, Bob Dylan) playing drums; Iommi, who is seemingly never at a loss to find the ultimate guitar riff at least three or four times on any of his albums, does all that again and more here.
Iommi and Hughes go back a long way – further back than Black Sabbath’s abortive 1986 album Seventh Star. Hughes brought glister to that album, but was such a liability on the road (drink, drugs) that the project was always doomed to failure.
“We were in LA getting ready for this gig one night, and I turned around and was like, where the fucking hell is Glenn?” Iommi had told me the last time we’d met (in 2000 to talk about his last solo album, Iommi). “He’d just disappeared and gone off to Atlanta! So we sent the security guy to go and get him. But he was just like a loon, you know? Just through doing so much coke and drinking. It was awful. After working with Ozzy for all those years it was the last thing I needed. And he wasn’t just the singer in the band, he’s also a friend.”
“I changed my lifestyle 15 years ago,” Hughes explains, referring to the Damascus-like transition that saw him turn his back on drink and drugs and find faith in God. “And Tony and I have always been friends. I’ve worked hard to get to this point, and now it seems like the right time to get together. And, you know, for all its faults people are still into that Seventh Star album. It’s a real sleeper.”
Hughes remembers first meeting Iommi in the early 70s; which elicits a quiet “Oh God” and a chuckle from the latter. “In Birmingham, at the Mayfair Suite, I think,” Hughes says, in an accent that manages to suggest both the West Midlands and California. “Tony [with Black Sabbath] had a first hit record with Paranoid, and I was there – I opened with Trapeze. And we might have said ‘Hey’ backstage, you know. And then I joined Deep Purple, and we ended up being on the California Jam [at the Ontario Speedway stadium in 1974] bill together. And we’d do award shows, we’d meet at places like the Beverley Wiltshire, we did that whole Los Angeles thing. Because both Sabbath and Purple were in LA a lot.”
In 1996 Hughes and Iommi reunited professionally once again to work on some songs that, by Hughes’s own admission, “were written for fun and maybe for other people. It wasn’t meant to be an album for Tony and Glenn.”
That record finally got an official release last year as The 1996 DEP Sessions, although it had been widely available before then as an illegal download on the internet.
“How on earth that got out I don’t know,” Iommi says. Hughes looks equally bewildered, casting one boot over the other with a slight shrug. “I remember we finished in the late summer, and I had to go back to the States. At this point we’d recorded the eight songs but we hadn’t mixed them, and Tony had them in his possession. And then Tony got back together with the guys in Sabbath – that must have been, what, 1997? So then, shortly after that, about a year later, this bloody bootleg showed up on the internet and it kind of put the kibosh on that. Tony wanted to use it for his next record, but he couldn’t do that. Much later, Tony’s guitar tech brought them to his house and said: ‘Tony, you really should listen to these again’.”
“And it was great to play them again, they sounded amazing,” Iommi says, his enthusiasm building. “We thought it would be good to put it out, and it’d stop all the bootleggers as well. We didn’t want to make a big deal of it, as it was already out there unofficially, but just so that people could hear it.
“And it helped in realising that we wanted to work together again. It was like when I did the Iommi album with all the different singers. That was a great thing to do, but you couldn’t go out and tour it. To tour it would have been a nightmare. But it was never meant to be a touring thing. This [Fused] is.”
Hughes and Iommi have now reconvened for the third time, after they decided to conduct the initial writing sessions for what became the Fused album in Birmingham – covert sessions, as it happens.
“I came over to England to record it. It was kind of done under the carpet at first… because I think a lot of people were of the opinion: do Glenn and Tony have anything else to offer?” Hughes says candidly. “I know going into it that I was on a creative roll. I love to write songs, he loves it, and we wrote Wasted Again and I Go Insane in the very first session, so we knew we were onto something straight away.”
Which is putting it mildly. The former is a brisk four minutes, heavy, dense and full of soul. The latter is nine minutes-plus and absurdly epic in tone; Iommi performs most of his songbook, while Hughes sings of unrequited love like he’s 17 again. It’s so good that it could cause most other bands to twitch uncomfortably.
“That was 17 minutes originally,” Hughes says, grinning. “We had two five-day working weeks to come up with the meat of the album. We stood together – and this is before Kenny came in – and we started messing around, cranked things up and just went for it, because we have a great kinship in our friendship, and working together is very comfortable for both of us, I think. And then it was two weeks to record the basics, and the vocals were done in five days. Kenny was done in a few days. We did almost all of it live, because that’s what we wanted: to have that band feeling, that looseness; we didn’t want it to be the ‘perfect’ thing [he wrinkles his nose when he says this]. We wanted to have the early sound; not a retro thing, really, but just so it was real.
“And if I’m honest, it’s been a while, but people have really started to listen to me again,” Hughes continues. “I think my Soul Mover album [released in 2005] got their attention. I’ve been threatening for some time to do something special, and really focus, and now getting to play hard rock with a soulful edge with the Dark Lord himself [laughs]… Playing with the greatest hard rock guitar player on the planet doesn’t suck. We work really hard, but there was a lot of laughing going on. And we came back with fresh ideas every day… We didn’t butt heads over anything.”
After Iommi has finished an extensive Ozzfest tour in 2006 with Black Sabbath, and Hughes has taken his Soul Mover band (including Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith) through Europe, the two of them intend to take their Fused band, including Kenny Aronoff, out on tour. Surprisingly, Iommi has never toured with anyone except Black Sabbath.
“No, I never have, strangely,” says the man Ozzy Osbourne refers to as Darth Vader. “So this will be the first time. And I feel really good about it, because it’s not under the Sabbath banner and we can play what we want to play – anything.” [He emphasises ‘anything’ with a flourish.] “That includes DEP and the Sabbath stuff we did. We think we’re going to take it to the States first. Or that’s what they tell us. We’re probably looking at November or December for that. You know, it’s been so much fun so far, there’s no reason not to do it.”
“So much fun,” Hughes chimes. “We could have kept going, you know, we had more than enough stuff. There are three more songs in the can you haven’t heard, and one we didn’t even get around to recording called Souls In The Sky.”
“We had that gang mentality, we were like kids,” says Iommi. “This is only the beginning. We’re starting a brand new thing here.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 82,
