By Martin Popoff

Relax, relax, read on… Anyway, to begin, Bravewords.com was deemed the first to review the album (here), but now that HEAVEN & HELL's The Devil You Know has been streaming, reports are pouring in that BLACK SABBATH Mk. II (technically Mk. III, I guess), have turned in a solid sledge of doom, perhaps a mite slow and expected – even safe - but seven ways to Sunday Bloody Sunday, a triumph of experience over expected cynicism.

“Yeah, we’re looking forward to it, mate. We’ve enjoyed doing the record as well,” begins Tony Iommi, on the subject of the record’s impending release (on April 28th - this writer’s birthday, I might add). Walking through the construction of the album, Tony says that the process started o’er at his place, in his well-equipped home studio…

“Yeah, and there we put together the basic ‘Breaking Into Heaven’ track; that was the first one. But mainly, at my studio, this time, I just put a lot of stuff down on CD, a lot of ideas, and went off to LA with quite a bit of stuff, really. And the idea was, we all thought we would do a CD, Ronnie (James Dio - vocals) would do one, and Geezer (Butler - bass) would do one, of their ideas. So we met up at Ronnie’s house, his studio, and just went through the CDs of what we’ve got to work on, and we picked out a particular riff we wanted to work on, or I might’ve done half the song, and it just needed some more parts, and then we would start building them up, really, one track at a time. And we were at Ronnie’s house for what, about six weeks, I think, so we wrote some new parts, and we’d probably done about six tracks then, at that point.”

What would be on the CDs? What would be on Geezer’s CD, for example?

“It’s just bits of riffs, really. Geezer tends to go in and sort of play riffs, and it might be just 20 minutes of playing. And then you narrow it down to pick a couple of riffs. ‘Oh, that’s a good one; we’ll use that.’ That’s how he tends to do it. With mine, I tend to work it out more, and pick out ones where I knew it was quite suitable. Whereas Geezer would play quite a few things. And he had quite a few good riffs on it, and Ronnie did as well. It was pretty healthy, to have so much stuff that we could go through and use.” Both Geez and Ronnie would ended up playing guitar on their respective demo CDs, with Ronnie, unsurprisingly adding lyric and vocal ideas as well.

“We had done six weeks at Ronnie’s,” continues Iommi, “writing, and then we had a break, and we went on the Metal Masters tour with JUDAS PRIEST, for a month, and then after that, we’d done another six weeks writing at Ronnie’s, and then we went into a rehearsal room and played them all live, and made sure we got them all pretty well how we wanted them. And then we came over to England, to Rockfield studios in Wales, to record. Because we wanted to basically have it all prepared and walk in the studio and play them, and tape it, really; that’s how we wanted to do it. And that’s what we did.”

One visitor to the studio you may have heard of was a guy named ROBERT PLANT (LED ZEPPELIN). “Yeah, Planty dropped by; he came over one day.” And what did he have to say for himself? “Just general, just talking about general things, what he’s up to and that. You see, the good thing about Rockfield, really, for us, it’s out of the way, we can all live together, we can all stay; you know, you’ve got all of the accommodation and everything. So you don’t get bothered as such. You don’t get a lot of people dropping by because it’s very quiet there. And that’s what we wanted. We wanted to get somewhere where we could concentrate on what we were doing. If we’d done it in LA, we would’ve been all over the place. But it’s nice to go someplace were you can’t do a lot, and not doing what you’re supposed to be doing.”

Now what was Vinny’s (Appice - drums) role in all this? You know, besides drums. I know in the old days he was sort of keeper the riff tapes, correct?

“Yeah, well he doesn’t have that job now. We fired him (laughs). No, Vinny was… I actually took my engineer over with me, Mike Exeter, that works here at my studio, and he came over, and he actually had done the engineering on this album. So we had him there. So Vinny was redundant on that side of it, so we could actually have Mike do a rough thing on the computer. He would take it all down, and it worked out that way, really. The band produced the record, with Mike, the engineer. And then after that, after we recorded the album, we went to Wyn Davis in Los Angeles, and he’d done the mixing of it, and I think he probably touched the drums up a bit. But the sounds are mostly there, I mean, as we had done them.”

Back to Vinny, I asked Tony if the guys ever overtly said anything or noticed that The Devil You Know probably contains Appice’s least complex drum performance on record.

“No. Yeah, he does… he does sometimes get a bit, fast rolls and stuff like that, but maybe he didn’t want to do it this time.”

So there was nobody telling him to simplify?

“No, I don’t think so. We might’ve come across... sometimes when we were actually putting a track down, he might’ve gone a bit over-the-top to try something, and he would decide himself, well, I’m going to keep it a bit more simple. And we’d record it again, and he would do it a bit more simple.”
“Ronnie has always amazed me, with what he does,” says Tony in closing, asked about the wonder of metal mythmanship that is Ronnie James Dio, oldest warhorse working this hard in all of rock ‘n’ roll, let alone having to deal with the weight of heavy metal. “How he can go on and sing like that… and he doesn’t warm up or anything. He just walks on and sings. Absolutely great at that. So everything amazes me with this band all around, really. We can say that about each other. How are we still doing it at this age? But you do it because you enjoy it, and with Ronnie, he enjoys it, it’s part of his life; he loves to go out and do it. He’s a pure professional. He doesn’t want to cancel shows or anything. He wants to go to do it. It’d have to be pretty rough for him to cancel a show.”

Stay tuned for our chat with Ronnie, coming soon.