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TYR and tired

For our next album, TYR, we went back to the Woodcray Studios in February 1990, with me and Cozy producing it again. On Headless Cross, Tony had just come into the band and he assumed, oh, Black Sabbath, it’s all about the Devil, so his lyrics were full of the Devil and Satan. It was too much in your face. We told him to be bit more subtle about it, so for TYR he did all these lyrics about Nordic gods and whatnot. It took me a while to get my head around that.

I particularly liked ‘Anno Mundi’. It starts with a choir singing in Latin ‘Anno Mundi’ and ‘The Sabbath Stones’ are really powerful, slow, pounding tracks. I like those heavy riff-type things, and ‘The Sabbath Stones’ is particularly heavy.

We did a video for ‘Feels Good To Me’, a ballad. It was a love story about some girl on a motorcycle and some boy who cheats on her and falls out with her and all that stuff. It also had footage of us playing on stage somewhere. It was a bit of a sloppy video, over the top for the sort of stuff we did.

You could compare TYR to Headless Cross like you could compare Mob Rules to Heaven and Hell. If anything, TYR had a heavier feel than Headless Cross. There’s the Ozzy thing and the Ronnie thing, and then there’s this. It’s like these albums belong to a lost era. I am even struggling to remember stuff from that time, because in a way it’s wiped from my mind. Geezer came to the show at the Hammersmith Odeon and we got him up to do ‘Iron Man’ and ‘Children Of The Grave’. It was the first time we played together since Live Aid, five years earlier. The reaction from the fans was great. I think whenever somebody from the original line-up gets up, they love it. I know I certainly enjoyed it.

After the Hammersmith gig we went to Europe. In the Jaap Edenhal in Amsterdam Cozy used CO₂ gas that was like a pressure cooker blowing its top with steam shooting up from the stage. When that happened it blew a couple of tiles out of the ceiling, which then came down on his head. So Cozy literally brought the roof down!