Black Sabbath star: I've seen a ghost

Jun 7 2009 by Lorne Jackson, Sunday Mercury

Which is when the ghost made its entrance. “We definitely saw one,” says Tony in an interview with Guitarist magazine. “We were setting up the gear in the dungeons and were the only people there.

“It was myself and Geezer, or myself and Ozzy, and we were walking down the hallway and we saw a cloaked figure coming towards us.

“We thought, who is that? It walked into a room, and we followed it to see who it was and there was nobody there.

“The room was an armoury with all the weapons on the wall, and there was nothing else in there.

“We told the people about it who owned the castle; we thought they’d think we were mad, but they just said, ‘Oh yes, that’s the castle ghost’.”

Tony has certainly lived a remarkable life, and not just because he spotted a spirit.

From the early days of his career in music, he has always been a bloke who could beat the odds.

In 1965 he was working in a factory when he lost the tips of his two middle fingers in a machine press accident. Digits that were essential for a budding guitarist.

The 18-year-old didn’t give up. Eventually he made his own artificial fingertips, and re-invented his guitar style to accommodate his infirmity.

The new style he created came to be known, the world-over, as Heavy Metal.

Tony was also instrumental in creating Black Sabbath’s most famous song, Paranoid, the idea of which he came up with while the rest of the band had gone for lunch.

It was recorded in no more than half an hour, yet it went on to become a song that epitomised the hulking hammer sound of Heavy Metal.

The Aston-born strummer also reveals that he is working on his autobiography.

“I’ve been working on it for ages,” he says. “It seems to be taking forever because of everything else going on.”

However, he says it’s important that he finishes the book eventually, as he believes no other biography has captured the spirit of the band.

“I don’t think one book on Sabbath has got it right, yet,” he explains. “They come up with all this bull****, but you can only get the right story from the people who were there.”