IRON MAN

TONY IOMMI TRULY IS THE IRON MAN OF ROCK. AFTER A HAND INJURY THAT WOULD HAVE HALTED MOST GUITARISTS IN THEIR TRACKS HE BATTLED A CONSTANT “YOU CAN’T DO THAT” FROM PARENTS, RECORD COMPANIES AND GUITAR BUILDERS, SURVIVED A REVOLVING DOOR OF BANDMATES (SINCE 1968 HE’S BEEN BLACK SABBATH’S ONLY CONSTANT MEMBER), AND EVEN BEAT CANCER. TO HONOUR HIS ASTOUNDING CAREER, GIBSON HAS RECREATED HIS HEAVILY MODIFIED SG SPECIAL, THE ‘MONKEY’ GUITAR. HERE, TONY WEAVES THE TALE OF THIS INSTRUMENT INTO THE STORY OF A CAREER THAT, WITHOUT SUCH DOGGED DETERMINATION, MIGHT NEVER HAVE HAPPENED…

- Neville Marten

First of all, tell us about the monkey sticker. Does it have a particular significance?

“Well, I had this jacket that I bought from Take 6 in London. I just barely afforded it and I wore it all the time. I wanted to make it a bit different for on stage, so I started putting metal stars and things on it. Then I found these monkeys and I thought, ‘I’ll put a couple of them on, and I’ll put one on the guitar as well.’ So I put one on the guitar and it became known as the ‘Monkey’ guitar.”

And how did the idea come about to recreate the Monkey SG with Gibson?

“It’s been talked about for quite a while. When the new owners came in they said, ‘Let’s do it’ – because that is my original guitar that was on all the early albums. I had a right-handed SG, upside-down, which I strung left-handed. But I heard of this guy who’d got a left-handed SG; he was righthanded and he played his upside-down. I didn’t know him from Adam, but we arranged to meet in a carpark. It looked a bit dodgy, but I finally got a left-handed SG.

“I had a Strat, which I played mainly, and I wanted another guitar as a spare. But when we came to record the first album [Black Sabbath], I played the very first song, Wicked World, with the Strat, and the pickup went, which is weird. In those days you couldn’t just go to the shop and get a pickup, and we only had two days in the studio. So I thought, ‘I’ve got to use this SG,’ and I ended up playing several albums on it.

“The band’s sound developed over a period. We’d be getting louder and heavier, and we decided this was the way we wanted to go – and I came up with that Wicked World riff. It was the first song we ever wrote and we really liked the way it was going.