Black Sabbath guitarist Tony Iommi has said that it’s “highly unlikely” that the band will ever play again.
The master of the downtuned guitar was speaking at a charity lunch in Birmingham, where he is the patron of Ward 19, the dedicated cancer ward of the city’s Heartland’s Hospital.
Asked if the heavy metal pioneers would get together again, Iommi replied: "It's highly unlikely, but we may. You can never say never, because we've done it so many times, you say, 'Oh, that's it now,' with different singers and different this and that. And all of a sudden, we're playing together again.
“I would hope we could do some one-offs, but we'll never tour the world again as we did, because it really is exhausting."
Iommi cited the rigours of touring during his advanced years as one of the reasons for not wanting to hit the road again.
“It takes its toll on your body,” Blabbermouth reports Iommi as saying. “All the traveling at different hours of the day and night. You finish a show at 11 o'clock. We'd base ourselves in one place, like New York or wherever we were, and then we'd stay in New York for 10 days, fly out and do a show and fly back in the night.
“So by the time you get to the hotel, it's four o'clock or five o'clock. And you can't sleep. And that's the difficult part. Even though you travel the best way you can. We had a great plane, we had great hotels — everything was marvellous — but it's still tiring."
The charity lunch took place at Birmingham’s Opus restaurant on Friday (20 April) and raised £23,000 for equipping a new cancer ward at the Heartland’s Hospital. Geoff Nicholls, Black Sabbath’s occasional keyboard player and close friend of Iommi, was treated for lung cancer at Ward 19. He lost his battle with the disease in January 2017.
Tony Iommi successfully underwent an operation in January 2017 to remove a noncancerous lump from his throat.
