BLACK Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi has said that Ozzy Osbourne’s appearance before playing his final show just over a year ago was shocking to his band-mates.
Interviewed on Sirius XM to promote an upcoming solo album, Iommi also again discussed his final conversation with Osbourne before his death on July 22 and the possibility of remastering the 1983 Born Again album and releasing it in deluxe boxed set form.
On the build-up to the all star Back To The Beginning concert, held at Villa Park on July 5, Iommi told the Faction Talk channel: “Ozzy and myself were in contact every week or every other week.
“Because he was in California and me in England, we’d always be in contact. Same old thing – ailments. ‘What’s wrong with you this week?’ “I’ve got this ache in my arm, what’s wrong with you?’ ‘Oh, I’ve had this foot problem’.
“That was regular conversation but it was nice to talk and see what each other were up to. I missed those days, talking to him.
“The thing was, I hadn’t seen Ozzy for two years. We did the Commonweath Games together in England and I hadn’t seen him from that day until we started rehearsals for the Back To The Beginning.
“I was really shocked when I saw him. Ozzy’s told me about his problems but to actually see him, me and the other guys: we were shocked to see him sort of carried in. It was quite sad really.”
Iommi has previously spoken about his conversation with Osbourne on the eve of his death, and how Ozzy told him he felt very weak. He repeated this on the Trunk Nation program.
On Born Again, he told host Eddie Trunk: “As you know, the tapes went missing and nobody knew where they were.
“And eventually they were found in the storage of one of the record companies and we managed to get them back and have them tranferred.
“So they are waiting to be ripped apart and have a listen but we haven’t got around to doing that yet. I’d definitely like to do that and see if we can better it really.
“Because initially that sounded really good. Somehow when we went away on tour and everything went in to be pressed and the rest of the stuff, it lost the quality of sound on it for some reason.
“None of us know what it was but yeah, I’d like to have a listen to that again and see what we could do.”
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