Not like Tony.
So I went down the pub with Bill, and we got completely lollied. Bill was on the cider, as usual: the farm stuff, basically one step removed from poison. He would mix it with black-currant juice to take the edge off. They sold it for two bob a pint in those days, which was the only reason why anyone drank it. But Bill kept at it, years after he could afford champagne.
He really took cider to heart, did Bill. When you had a few pints of that stuff it wasn’t like being drunk, it was like having a head injury.
Tony was the main topic of conversation that night, and I can honestly say that we weren’t jealous of what he was doing. We were just heartbroken. As much as we both liked Jethro Tull, we thought Earth could be better —a hundred times better. Before he left, Tony had been coming up with all these heavy-duty riffs of his own— heavier than anything I’d heard anywhere before—and Geezer had started to write far-out lyrics to go with them. As for me and Bill, we’d been improving with every gig. And unlike a lot of the one-hit-wonder Top-Forty bands at the time, we weren’t fake. We hadn’t been put together by some suit-and-tie in a smoky office in London somewhere. We weren’t one star, a cool name, and a bunch of session players who changed with every tour.
We were the real fucking deal.
Tony left in December 1968.
It was so cold that winter that I started to have flashbacks to the time when I’d worked as a plumber, bending over manholes while my arse-crack frosted over. Without Tony, me and the lads had fuck-all to do apart from sit around all day, moan, and drink cups of tea. All our gigs had been cancelled, and we’d given up our day jobs long ago, which meant none of us had any dough, so even going down the pub wasn’t an option.
No one wanted to think about getting ‘real’ work, though.
‘In 1968, John Osbourne was an up-and-coming rock ’n’ roll star,’ I would say in this fake movie-announcer voice as I wandered around the house. ‘In 1969, he was an up-and-coming garbageman.’
The one thing we had to look forward to was seeing Tony on the telly. The BBC was going to broadcast the gig in London with the Rolling Stones. It was going to be called ‘The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus’. Nothing like it had ever been done before: the Stones would basically play a private show with a few of their rock star pals at Intertel Studios in Wembley, where the set would be made to look like a circus ring with a big top over it. Jethro Tull would open. Then The Who would play. Mick Jagger had even talked John Lennon into doing a version of ‘Yer Blues’ with a one-off band called the Dirty Mac—featuring Eric Clapton on guitar, Mitch Mitchell on drums and Keith Richards on bass. I didn’t even know Richards could play bass. The press was going nuts about it, because it was going to be the first time Lennon had done a gig since the Beatles’ last show in 1966. (Someone told me later that one of those posh BBC producers called up Lennon and asked him what kind of amplifier he wanted to use, and he just replied, ‘One that works.’ Fucking priceless, man. I wish I could have met that guy.)
In the end, though, the BBC never broadcast the thing. The Stones killed it. I heard that Jagger wasn’t too pleased about how the Stones had sounded during the gig. It was twenty-eight years before the footage was finally shown, at the New York Film Festival. If you ever get to see it, Tony’s the one in the white hat with the king-sized ferret on his upper lip. He does a great job of playing ‘Song for Jeffrey’, although there doesn’t seem to be much chemistry between him and Ian Anderson.
Maybe that’s why he decided to quit after four days.
‘What d’you mean, you quit?’ asked Geezer, at an emergency meeting down the pub a few days before Christmas.
‘It wasn’t my scene,’ said Tony, with a shrug.
The drinks were on him.
‘How can being in Jethro Tull not be your scene?’ said Geezer. ‘You played a gig with John Lennon, man!’
‘I want to be in my own band. I don’t want to be someone else’s employee.’
‘So Ian Anderson’s a tosser, then?’ I asked, getting to the point.
‘No—he’s all right,’ said Tony. ‘He just wasn’t… We didn’t have a laugh, y’know? It wasn’t like this.’
Bill, already on his third pint of cider, looked like he was about to burst into tears.
‘So are we back together?’ said Geezer, trying not to lose his cool by grinning too much.
‘If you’ll have me.’
‘OK. But can we please now find another name?’ I said.
‘Look, forget about the name,’ said Tony. ‘We just need to agree that we’re all serious. We can’t fuck around any more. I’ve seen how guys like Jethro Tull work. And they work, man: four days of rehearsals for one show. We need to start doing that. And we need to start writing our own songs and playing them, even if we get boos. The punters will soon get to know them. It’s the only way we’re going to make a name for ourselves. And we need to think about an album. Let’s go and talk to Jim Simpson in the morning.’
Everyone nodded seriously.
None of us could believe our fucking luck, to be honest with you. Was Tony insane? No one in their right mind would give up the kind of gig he’d just walked away from. Even Robert Plant had eventually gone off to join Jimmy Page in the New Yardbirds, leaving Hobbsbollocks in the dust. And I can’t tell you that I’d have done the same thing if I’d been in Tony’s position. As much as I was heartbroken when Earth split up, if I’d been the one walking into a band with national recognition, headliner status and a record deal, it would have been, ‘Oh, er, see ya!’ The bottom line was you had to take your hat off to Tony Iommi. He knew what he wanted, and he obviously believed that he could get it without taking a ride on Ian Anderson’s coat tails.
All we had to do was prove he’d made the right decision.
‘OK, lads,’ said Tony, draining his pint and slamming the glass back down on the table.
‘Let’s get to work.’
One of the first things Jim Simpson did as our manager was pack us off on a ‘European tour’. This meant loading our gear into Tony’s van—which by now had been upgraded from a Commer to a Transit—driving it on to a ferry at Harwich, sailing across the North Sea to the Hook of Holland, then hoping the engine would start again when it was time to get off. The temperature in Denmark would be twenty below freezing. From the Hook of Holland, the plan was to drive to Copenhagen, where our first gig had been booked.
I remember taking my entire wardrobe with me on that trip. It consisted of one shirt on a wire hanger, and one pair of underpants in a carrier bag. I was wearing everything else: jeans, second-hand Air Force overcoat, Henry’s Blues House T-shirt, lace-up boots.
Day one, the van broke down. It was so cold the accelerator cable froze, so when Tony put his foot down it snapped in half. Which meant we were stranded in the middle of fucking nowhere, halfway to Copenhagen. There was a blizzard outside, but Tony said it was my job—as the band’s ‘public representative’—to go and find some help. So out I walked into this field, snow blowing into my face, two icicles of snot hanging out of my nose, until finally I saw the lights of a farmhouse up ahead. Then I fell into a trench. After finally pulling myself out of the fucking thing, I waded through the snow until I reached the front door, then knocked loudly.
‘Halloj?’ said the big, red-faced Eskimo bloke who opened the door.
‘Oh, thank fuck,’ I said, out of breath and sniffling. ‘Our van’s knackered. Can you gis a tow?’
‘Halloj?’
I didn’t know any Danish, so I pointed towards the road, and said, ‘Van. El kaputski. Ya?’
The guy just looked at me and started to pick wax out of his ear. Then he said, ‘Bobby Charlton, ja?’
‘Eh?’
‘Bobby Charlton, betydningsfuld skuespiller, ja?’
‘Sorry mate, speako Englishki?’
‘Det forstar jeg ikke,’ he said, with a shrug.
‘Eh?’
We stood there and looked at each other for a second.
Then he went, ‘Undskyld, farvel,’ and shut the door in my face. I gave it a good old kick and set off back through the waist-high snow. I was so cold, my hands were turning blue.
When I reached the road I saw a car coming and almost threw myself in front of it. Turned out it was the Danish cops—friendly ones, thank God. They gave me a sip from a flask they kept in the glove box. I don’t know what was in that thing, but it warmed me up soon enough. Then they organised a tow-truck to take us to a garage
