Andrew Watt claims that Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler wanted to make one more Black Sabbath album with the group's original line-up in the early 2020s, but that the idea never got off the ground because drummer Bill Ward couldn't commit to the idea.
"We had made these two Ozzy albums [2020's Ordinary Man, and 2022's Patient Number 9]," producer Watt tells the Lipps Service podcast, "and Ozzy wanted to make another album[but] didn't want to do exactly the same thing that we had done before, so he was into the idea of doing a Sabbath album. So Sharon and him said I had to call and talk to each guy and see if they were into it.
"So I called Tony, talked to him, and he said he was into it as long as Bill was there," Watts continues. "That was everyone's thing. Ozzy was like, 'If Bill does it, we'll do it.' Geezer said, 'If the other guys are in it, I'm in to do it.' Right. So I had this 40-minute call with Bill, which was one of the weirdest and funniest phone calls just ever... Long story short, it ended up that Bill was not going to be able to make the record, he wasn't able to do it for a multitude of different reasons. So that's why that didn't happen. But the other guys were all into doing it, and then Bill sent us all this long email, and then it was over."
Watts claims don't quite tally with what Tony Iommi told Classic Rock magazine this summer, when he stated that, despite encouragement from Watt, he personally wasn't into the idea of making follow-up to Sabbath's 2013 album 13, which he, Osbourne and Butler recorded with Rage Against The Machine drummer Brad Wilk. That album was the first Osbourne-fronted Black Sabbath album since 1978's Never Say Die!
"I’d met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy," Iommi recalled to Classic Rock. “He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn’t know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill. Also, we’d done 13, and I didn’t like the idea of: ‘Now here's another album'."
Tony Iommi will release his own solo record, From The Dark, on October 23 via BMG. The guitarist has previewed the album with the release of singles World Alone and Stormwatcher.
