A little over a year has passed since Black Sabbath performed the final show of their last ever tour, appropriately dubbed The End, on February 4, 2017 in their hometown of Birmingham, England. 

Dean Pedley of The Midlands Rocks caught up with legendary guitarist Tony Iommi for a quick Q&A session; an excerpt follows:

It’s been twelve months now since the final shows at Genting Arena. What was going through your mind as the tour came to a close?

"It didn’t hit too much until the last shows really, because it felt it was going to be almost like we had always done – finish the tour, go away and then get back together a few weeks or months later and start to make plans for the next one. And so it sort of felt like that but it didn’t, if you know what I mean. There was that side to it where you suddenly thought 'hang on a minute, this is the last time we will be playing this song,' and so that was when it really started to hit home."

How have you spending your time since the tour finished; are you enjoying having a good rest?

"Rest! I thought after this tour, well now, I will get time to just relax and do some stuff that I had always wanted to do… but it hasn’t happened yet! I don’t know what it is, the time is just flying by and I think because of all the years of not seeing my friends that often, it has got to the stage now where I see them a lot. And we moved house, and we met a new group of friends, so we have the old friends and the new friends and we just seem to be doing more than ever."

Are you thinking about any sort of music related activity at the moment?

"Music wise, I would certainly like to start writing again. But at the moment, I’m doing a lot of stuff for charities; Heartlands Hospital, which is part of the Heart of England Foundation Trust, and also Wythall Animal Sanctuary and both of those are very dear to me. I just try and help where I can and with the Hospital Trust at the moment, we are trying to raise some money to buy some beds for the chemo patients. So that is something that I very much like to be involved with. You see the nurses and the doctors; they work so hard and they don’t get a lot of credit for it, and when you’re in there they are all so committed and it sparks me off and so that’s what I’ve been spending some of my time doing."

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