Iron Man by Tony Iommi Page B

really get down to it.’
    He agreed. So we phoned the others from London and made a plan to get back together.
    I still had to do this Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus . The opening of the whole thing was in the Dorchester Hotel. There was me with the same buckskin jacket again. I wore it for the film as well. The Stones had all their gear set up on the floor of a ballroom. The Who were there and Taj Mahal and all the people who were in the movie, but I didn’t know a soul and felt like a spare dinner. Marianne Faithfull must have sensed that; she came over and went: ‘You’ll be all right, I’ll talk to you.’
    And so she did, she was great.
    The Stones started playing but within a minute or so they stopped. They started arguing and had the biggest row. The whole room went quiet. Brian Jones and Keith Richards were screaming at each other: ‘You are fucking out of tune, you fucking . . .’
    Because he was with Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger came over to us, saying: ‘They can’t even fucking tune their fucking guitars.’
    It was a sure sign of troubles to come.
    The next day we filmed in a big warehouse somewhere. They had a stage set up and something that looked like a circus ring. They wanted people to dress up in silly hats and circus stuff, which seemed ridiculous to me. Even Eric Clapton said: ‘I feel fucking silly wearing this stupid thing.’
    They gave me this bloody clarinet and we all had to come out pretending to play as we were going around the ring. Clapton, The Who and John Lennon – everybody had to go around this
thing. After we all did that I don’t know how many times to get it right, people started chatting and it got a bit more comfortable.
    We were all eagerly awaiting the much anticipated jam with Clapton, Lennon, Mitch Mitchell, and Keith Richards playing bass. I said to Ian Anderson: ‘I’m really looking forward to seeing Clapton play.’
    They started jamming on this instrumental thing, bloody Yoko sitting at John’s feet, and they weren’t good at all. So Ian said: ‘What do you think of your hero now then!?’
    We shared a dressing room with The Who, so that was my first time meeting them. They were nice enough and when they started to play they were really good. I was completely surprised when I heard Pete Townshend playing lead, because you never normally heard him do that very much and he played great.
    Not everybody played for real; we did ‘Song For Jeffrey’. Ian Anderson got this hat and he said: ‘Try that on.’
    I said: ‘It looks all right’, but I felt pretty embarrassed and kept my head down while I was playing so people couldn’t see me.
    It was ages before that ever came out. I bumped into Bill Wyman two or three times and he said: ‘Oh yeah, I’ll get you a copy of that for you.’
    He never did, so I never saw it until years later and it was horrible. It’s so out of date. But it’s a classic now; half the people who were in that show are dead. There’s John Lennon, Keith Moon, Brian Jones and Mitch Mitchell . . . it’s a Rock ’n’ Roll Circus, all right.

14
    The early birds catch the first songs
    After I came back from London I said to the rest of the band: ‘If we’re going to do this, we’re going to do it seriously and really work at it, starting with rehearsals at nine o’clock in the morning. Sharp!’
    We booked a place in the Newtown Community Centre in Aston, across the road from a cinema, and started a whole new regime. I’d pick everybody up to make sure that we got there on time. Geezer didn’t live that far away, so he’d walk down. Occasionally he’d be a little bit late, but on average we were there at a sensible hour to start work. And that’s when we began writing our own songs. ‘Wicked World’ and ‘Black Sabbath’ were the first two that were written during