By the end of their Born Again tour, in March 1984, Black Sabbath were in a career death spiral. Having pulled off the previously thought impossible – successfully replacing singer Ozzy Osbourne, with former Rainbow vocalist Ronnie James Dio – they made a giant misstep when replacing Dio with former Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan.
Dio had bent over backwards trying to maintain the integrity of the band, and the two Sabbath albums he recorded (Heaven And Hell in 1980 and Mob Rules in ’81) both restored the band’s musical credibility and returned them to platinum-selling status in America. Gillan, by contrast, admitted he had never even liked Sabbath’s music. That was brought home by his unwillingness to even learn the lyrics of classic Sabbath numbers like War Pigs; he had the words to the songs scrawled on the pages of a scrapbook concealed behind his vocal monitors.
When, during their debut UK show at the Reading Festival in August 1983, Sabbath encored with the old Purple warhorse there was disbelief, then disdain, then ridicule. It later emerged that they had also considered playing Purple’s More astonishingly, with ELO’s Bev Bevan“But every time Iommi counted it in, it would make us all fall about laughing!” recalled Sabbath’s keyboard player Geoff Nicholls.
