TONY IOMMI Comments On Unreleased BLACK SABBATH Tracks

BLACK SABBATH/HEAVEN AND HELL guitarist Tony Iommi recently spoke to Guitar World magazine about his 40 years in music, and one of the subjects broached by writer Chris Gill was the fact that a handful of BLACK SABBATH songs recorded in the band's early days when they were still known as EARTH — including "The Rebel", "When I Came Down" and "Song For Jim" — have yet to be released to this day.

According to Iommi, "We didn’t write those songs. They were written by a chap named Norman Haines. At the time we were managed by Jim Simpson, who was a local Birmingham guy. He insisted that we record these songs that his friend Norman had written. We just wanted to play, so we recorded them. We wanted to write our own songs and make our own record, but this was just an initial effort. We had never been in a recording studio in our lives before that. It was a very basic studio. Even back then we never really wanted those recordings to see the light of day. Those songs sound nothing remotely like BLACK SABBATH."

A brief audio snippet of "When I Came Down" can be heard below.

A collection of unpublished outtakes from Guitar World's interview with Tony Iommi can be read here.