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Black Sabbath

• November 2, 1983 Setlist

Black Sabbath Setlist at Capital Centre, Landover, MD, USA

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Tour: Born Again Tour statistics Add setlist

• Children of the Grave Play Video
• Hot Line Play Video
• War Pigs Play Video
• Supernaut Play Video
• Disturbing the Priest Play Video
• Drum Solo Play Video
• Rock 'n' Roll Doctor Play Video
• The Dark Play Video
• Zero the Hero Play Video
• Black Sabbath Play Video
• Iron Man Play Video
• Heaven and Hell Play Video
• Guitar Solo Play Video
• Digital Bitch Play Video
• Smoke on the Water ( Deep Purple  cover) Play Video
• Paranoid Play Video

Edits and Comments

6 activities (last edit by ExecutiveChimp , 19 Dec 2020, 04:40 Etc/UTC )

Songs on Albums

• Digital Bitch
• Disturbing the Priest
• Zero the Hero
• Guitar Solo
• Heaven and Hell
• Children of the Grave
• Rock 'n' Roll Doctor
• Smoke on the Water by Deep Purple

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Capital centre.

• Black Sabbath This Setlist Add time Add time
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Black Sabbath Gig Timeline

• Oct 30 1983 Nassau Veterans Memorial Coliseum Uniondale, NY, USA Add time Add time
• Nov 01 1983 Providence Civic Center Providence, RI, USA Add time Add time
• Nov 02 1983 Capital Centre This Setlist Landover, MD, USA Add time Add time
• Nov 04 1983 Centrum in Worcester Worcester, MA, USA Add time Add time
• Nov 05 1983 Spectrum Philadelphia, PA, USA Add time Add time

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Keep It Warm: Black Sabbath’s Born Again At 40

Looking back on the metal legends’ sole album with Deep Purple’s Ian Gillan

Remember in the old cartoons, when the coyote would run off a cliff and stand confused in space, not falling until he realized that there was no solid ground beneath his feet?

That’s exactly where Black Sabbath found itself in 1983, when they recorded their 11th studio album, Born Again. 

Knowing that the master tapes for Born Again were found in 2021—and that a Super Deluxe Edition with a full remix could be imminent—makes celebrating this record feel a bit premature. But then, nothing about Born Again went according to plan. Even its 40th anniversary was celebrated a month early, because an apocryphal release date of August 7, 1983 had been making the rounds for decades. Only over the last few weeks did Sabbath scholars and internet sleuths determine that the official UK release date was actually on Sept 12, with the U.S. edition being birthed either on the same date, or sometime after.

Regardless, this is the last “great” Sabbath album for many fans, especially those who weren’t interested in the band’s subsequent decade, during which Tony Iommi was (usually) the only original member in the group. 

Born Again boasts everyone from the classic lineup except Ozzy. That’s Iommi, Butler, Ward and oft-overlooked keyboardist-behind-the-curtain Geoff Nicholls. Lead vocals came courtesy of Ian Gillan of Deep Purple Mk II, leading many to call this lineup Deep Sabbath or Purple Sabbath. After a few reinvigorating years of Dio fronting the group, with Vinnie Appice on drums, Iommi and Butler were happy to have an all-British lineup once more.

Much has been written about the schism during the mix of the 1982 Live Evil concert album. Whatever happened, Dio was ready to kick off a tremendously successful solo career. Egos (enflamed by de rigueur cocaine usage) made it impossible to continue. The good news is that this brought a newly sober Bill Ward back into the fold on drums. And after a long night of pub drinking in a meeting set up by Sabbath manager Don Arden, Tony Iommi offered Ian Gillan an equal share as partner and vocalist.

Gillan had been leading his own eponymous band, who released six studio albums. After a few months off to treat his vocal nodes, he unceremoniously broke up that group to join Sabbath. Born Again was written and recorded at Richard “Virgin” Branson’s Manor Studio. There the band took up residence, though the eccentric Gillan set up camp in a tent outside. 

All manner of hell broke loose during the sessions, thanks to band pranks, which often involved explosives prepared by Sabbath’s expert pyrotechnic crew. Gillan took to visiting the pub in a boat, in order to avoid drinking and driving, though he still managed to wreck the car that was rented for Bill Ward.

That accident was the inspiration for the album’s lead track, “Trashed.” When Gillan sings, “the ground was in my sky” he’s being literal. This song is clearly modeled on up-tempo, barnstorming album openers like “Neon Nights” and “Turn Up The Night,” and fits favorably among them…except for the inexcusably muddy mix.

After two legendary albums with Iron Maiden (and Deep Purple) producer Martin Birch, Sabbath returned to self-producing, with engineer Robing Black getting a co-producer credit. His work on Sabotage yielded some of the finest audio in the band’s catalog. Unfortunately, no one really knows what happened to the final Born Again sound picture. Supposedly Geezer Butler was left in charge at the end, and some say he pushed the bass louder in the mix. He vehemently denies this, though. Somewhere further along, the mix was ruined. The first time the band heard Born Again, while out promoting the record on tour, they were appalled. By then the album was #4 in the UK charts, and there was nothing to be done. 

“Trashed” also received a nonsensical, low budget music video that combines concert footage, Night Of The Living Dead homage, and scantily clad women. Despite the obvious anti-drinking and driving message, the song still landed on the PMRC’s “Filthy Fifteen” list.

Two minutes of atmospheric soundscape called “Stonehenge” follows “Trashed” on side one of Born Again. The band spent hours creating a mysterious sound by submerging a bell in water. Years later, Iommi lamented that the same effect could be done with a keyboard in a few minutes now. Regardless, that sort of studio experimentation is a bit like using a practical effect instead of CGI, and still sounds cool today. The Deluxe Expanded Edition of Born Again includes an extended version of “Stonehenge” that is nearly five minutes long.

On the Born Again tour, someone (reportedly Geezer) suggested a Stonehenge stage theme. Supposedly management mistakenly wrote meters instead of feet, and the band ended up with stage scenery so large that it was only usable at two outdoor concerts. The oversized triptychs physically would not fit into any of the arenas Sabbath played in 1983. If all of this sounds familiar, it’s because the anecdote was shared with someone in the Spinal Tap camp, who used an inversion of the story in their own hilarious, undersized Stonehenge scene in the classic 1984 mockumentary. 

Track three is one of Born Again’s finest moments, a hefty slab of metallic doom called “Disturbing The Priest”. Black Sabbath had left a door to The Manor open, while the priest next door was trying to have choir practice. There was no actual conflict, and both parties were polite and civil. They worked out a scheduling compromise, and the issue dissolved. Regardless, the scenario inspired Butler’s lyrics. Iommi married them to one of his archest riffs, creating a foreboding and cataclysmic tune that is one of the heaviest in the band’s catalog. 

Even on the first album, Black Sabbath had given names to their interludes, and even movements of songs. Originally that was for publishing reasons, because having a certain number of tracks on the album yielded better royalties. Whether or not that was still the case in 1983, a short instrumental called “The Dark” follows “Disturbing The Priest” and was even used in concert at the band’s set at the Reading Festival that year. 

Breaking up the two best and heaviest songs on the album was likely a good idea. Side one concludes with the absolutely massive “Zero The Hero”. As long as you can overlook the ridiculous lyrics, which find the usually earthy Gillan going in an uncharacteristic fantasy direction, it’s often considered Born Again’s best song. Guns ‘n’ Roses must have agreed, because they lifted the main riff, sped it up a bit, and used it in their smash hit “Paradise City.”

As seriously as I take this fantastic song, I will never not laugh at the lines:

Your life is a six lane highway to nowhere

You’re going so fast you’re never ever gonna get down there

Where the heroes sit by the river

With a magic in their music as they eat raw liver.

Though side two brings diminishing rewards, there are no duds on this album. As far as songwriting is concerned, Iommi still had it. By 1983, metal had proven hardy enough to survive the punk and new wave explosion. In November of that year, Quiet Riot’s Metal Health became the first heavy metal album to reach number one on the Billboard charts. A few months prior, they were playing support to Black Sabbath on the Born Again tour. Born Again, on the other hand, peaked at number 39. 

“Digital Bitch” could easily be a Diamond Head track, or a standout cut from any other NWOBHM act. Which is to say that it’s a hard charging, decent outing for Sabbath. I don’t know that any of the band members have gone on record to state who the digital bitch is, but it is widely considered to be a dig at Ozzy’s manager Sharon. Her father Don Arden was managing Sabbath at the time, and father and daughter were not on speaking terms. 

The album’s title track is also its longest, a melancholy dirge of a power ballad. “Born Again” gives Gillan ample occasion to show off his voice’s volume and versatility.  

In the album’s boneyard position appears “Hot Line” which wouldn’t be out of place on a Motley Crüe or W.A.S.P. album from the same period. This could easily be a throwaway track, except that Black Sabbath really knew how to write songs. So the arrangement, the interplay, the bridges, all make something greater than the sum of its parts…even if the lyrics don’t really add up to much.

The original Born Again album concludes with a rare love song. Of course that’s bread and butter for Gillan, but not a subject that rears its head much when Osbourne, Butler, Dio, or Tony Martin are penning the lyrics. “Keep It Warm” lurches and stomps, keeping Gillan’s feelings grounded. And of course the song (like all Sabbath songs) really elevates when Iommi’s epic lead break comes along. 

Expanded editions of Born Again include one of the best studio outtakes in their entire catalog, “The Fallen.” There’s also a spirited recording of their Reading Festival performance, which features ELO’s Bev Bevan on drums. Ward celebrated the completion of Born Again with some drinks, and fell so heavily off the wagon that he was unable to participate in the tour. 

The Born Again era ended unceremoniously with Gillan rejoining Deep Purple for their highly successful Perfect Strangers reunion album. At this point, even Geezer Butler left to attempt a solo career, and Iommi tried to do the same. Much to his chagrin, Warner Brothers forced him to release his next album as “Black Sabbath Featuring Tony Iommi” which did no one any favors.

There are some early mixes of Born Again floating around, sometimes called “demoes” and sometimes bootlegged as “The Manor Tapes.” For fanatics, they’re worth a listen. But let’s hope Rhino is actually going to give us a proper remix of this killer record now that the master tapes have been found. Of all the post-Dio Black Sabbath albums worth rediscovering, this is the best of them.

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Nathan Carson

Nathan Carson is a writer, musician, and MOTH StorySlam Champion from Portland, Oregon. A founding member of the international doom band Witch Mountain, Carson is the host of the FM radio show The Heavy Metal Sewïng Cïrcle, owner of boutique booking agency Nanotear, and author of the weird horror novella Starr Creek. More about his music, music writing, fiction and graphic novels can be found at www.nathancarson.rocks.

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I told Nate: Live at Last is my favorite Sabb album. It’s them warts exposed

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Black Sabbath’s “Born Again” Turns 40

Born Again is the strangest album in Black Sabbath’s career and the product of their strangest era. It might be the most bizarre album in heavy metal’s 50-plus-year history. Unsurprisingly, it started with a night at a bar. 

Sabbath was without vocalist Ronnie James Dio, who left the band after recording two Decibel Hall of Fame classics: Heaven and Hell and Mob Rules . Vocalist Ian Gillan — best known for fronting Deep Purple — went out drinking with Sabbath. Towards the night’s end, they asked if he wanted to join Sabbath. Gillan agreed but was so drunk he forgot he said yes. After a scolding from his manager, he was the frontman of the second great band of his career.

Cataloging the weirdness and rock lore associated with the Born Again era could fill a small book. In the interest of time, we’ll share some highlights:

• Born Again was recorded at billionaire Richard Branson’s country estate in England, conveniently close to a monastery (hence the song “Disturbing the Priest” ). 
• The song “Trashed” recounts Gillan taking out a go-kart while wasted and wrecking it on Branson’s property. 
• The cover art of a devil baby (designed by Steve “Krusher” Joule ) is one of the top five most memorable album covers in metal history, despite or because of an utter lack of taste.
• Some in the Sabbath camp nicknamed the devil baby “Sharon” after Sharon Osbourne. Sharon was managing Ozzy, and her father, Don Arden, was managing Sabbath. There was bad blood.
• The devil baby is a reconfigured version of the same infant on the cover of Depeche Mode’s “New Life” single and, earlier, a cover of Mind Life magazine. 
• Gillan claimed he “puked” when he saw the cover. 
• Born Again birthed two of the most incomprehensible and ludicrous music videos in the idiom’s history. The videos are so bad I wrote an essay about them years ago.
• The short version: the videos combine Jim Morrison’s student films and The Curious Dr. Humpp , an Argentine exploitation flick involving a hunchback creature with a guitar. 
• Sabbath built a Stonehenge model for the Born Again tour. It didn’t always fit on stage. Geezer Butler said this in his memoir Into the Void : “When we rehearsed at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, the stones were set up on the floor and actually looked really expressive. But when we did our first gig of the tour in Norway and put the stones on the stage, they were almost touching the ceiling.”
• Many of This Is Spinal Tap ‘s most outlandish stories are sourced from Born Again era Sabbath. Butler has confirmed this . 

• Manager Arden liked the devil baby so much that he decided a dwarf would dress up as the baby and crawl on top of the Stonehenge model.
• During a dress rehearsal in Canada, the dwarf fell off the fake Stonehenge onto a pile of mattresses. Mercifully, the devil dwarf did not tour extensively.  
• Gillan could never remember the words to classic Sabbath songs or didn’t take them seriously (or both). Gillan wrote the lyrics down in a cue book for the stage but couldn’t see them because of the dry ice. He fell to his knees often to read the cues. Somehow, the shows sounded good — check out the “Purple Sabbath” bootlegs and the live recordings on the Born Again deluxe set .

Mind you, this isn’t every story from Born Again , just some of the best. Somehow, Sabbath birthed a career worth of absurdity, folklore, and rock myth in under a calendar year. They also recorded an album in the middle of this chaos. 

Considering this history, how does one evaluate Born Again , which turns 40 today? Born Again is one of Sabbath’s most divisive albums. Scores of fans consider it a masterpiece worthy of the band’s top ten, and many consider it dreck. The truth is somewhere in between. Born Again isn’t close to the first six Sabbath albums or the three (OK, four) studio albums made with Dio. Anyone who claims this is trolling or deaf. But Sabbath left many riches over their long and complicated career, and Born Again is a great, if flawed, metal album.

Born Again has many strengths. The album contains some of the best ’80s Sabbath songs. Born Again has a distinct ’80s feel, unusual considering Sabbath’s ability to create music that exists outside of chronology. “Trashed” is a fast and fitting opener and oozes sleaze and bad decisions. “Disturbing the Priest” highlights Gillan’s banshee wails, and “Zero the Hero” contains one of Tony Iommi’s career-best riffs. Less than a decade later, Guns N’ Roses conquered the world with a similar “Paradise City.” Cannibal Corpse also covered “Zero the Hero” on their Hammer Smashed Face EP.

Born Again ‘s production is uniformly dreadful, and different mixes have surfaced. If anything, it doesn’t hurt that this album sounds like it was recorded in a cave. Many fans have said in forums that this album sounds genuinely “evil,” and part of that is the dissonance.  The original mix is the way Born Again should be heard.  If anything hurts Born Again, it is inconsistency. The first side is much stronger than what follows. “Digital Bitch” is forgettable pseudo-glam, and “Keep It Warm” is tepid.  If side two of Born Again was as strong as the first, we could consider this a peer of Sabbath’s landmarks.

Instead, we have Born Again , the flawed gem with countless footnotes, tall tales, and garish visuals. In some ways, Born Again ‘s maligned cover has reached much further than the music. There are doubtless many fans wearing Born Again T-shirts who’ve never heard the album. Metal fans love boundary-pushing and tastelessness, and there wasn’t much that could compete with baby Sharon in 1983 outside of emerging underground bands like Venom. There are, however, also those fans who get Born Again and wear the shirts out of genuine admiration. Born Again will never compete with the stories of what was happening around it. The album, however, is still an exciting glimpse of a timeless band in transition. What you gonna be, what you gonna be brother?

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New vocalists lasted five minutes and founder members quit amid the chaos: 1984 was an awful year for Black Sabbath, and by its end they were almost obliterated

Molotov cocktails and member mayhem: The chaotic story of Black Sabbabth's worst year

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 Smoke On The Water , there was disbelief, then disdain, then ridicule. It later emerged that they had also considered playing Purple’s Black Night . More astonishingly, with ELO ’s Bev Bevan having become the latest drummer to replace Bill Ward, at short notice, guitarist Tony Iommi (at Bevan’s quiet urging) had actually suggested they have a crack at ELO’s Evil Woman . “But every time Iommi counted it in, it would make us all fall about laughing!” recalled Sabbath’s keyboard player Geoff Nicholls.

The world tour, stretched over seven excruciating months, would become legendary for all the wrong reasons. A week before Reading, bassist Geezer Butler narrowly avoided arrest when he threw a Molotov cocktail from his hotel room window, destroying another guest’s Ford Cortina. Three weeks after Reading, cops were called to a fight at a club in Barcelona, begun after the bouncers took exception to Gillan ‘jokingly’ setting fire to one of their waiters. Running to escape the mass brawl, Butler was arrested after jumping into the back of a police car, mistaking it for a taxi. 

The most eye-wateringly embarrassing aspect of the Born Again tour, though, was the stage set. Ostensibly built around the portentous two-minute instrumental Stonehenge , the stone models were so huge they couldn’t fit them into more than a handful of venues. “The bloody things were forty-feet high,” Gillan snorted. 

Adding to the sense of the absurd, they had a dwarf dressed as the red devil-baby on the Born Again sleeve . The dwarf was told to crawl atop the Stonehenge pillars, before falling backwards with a scream onto (unseen) a pile of safety mattresses. A tolling bell was then the cue for a parade of roadies dressed as monks to drift across the stage, as if in prayer. At the very first show, Gillan recalled, when “the dwarf-baby fell backwards his screams didn’t stop. Someone had forgotten to put the mattresses out! I was looking out from the side of the stage and you could see people turning to each and going: ‘What the fuck?’”

That ludicrous situation was made immortal when producers of the film This Is Spinal Tap , released as the Born Again tour finally ended, spoofed it in reverse when the fictitious Tap discover their Stonehenge models have been built so small that a dwarf towers over them.

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When it was announced at the start of 1984 that Gillan would be leaving Sabbath after the tour in order to participate in a full-on Deep Purple reunion that summer, a sense of betrayal was added to the growing realisation that Sabbath were becoming a joke. 

Gillan feigned astonishment. “Myself, Tony and Geezer all knew that once the world tour was over I would be teaming up with Deep Purple… The Purple thing was always there from day one and pretty much on schedule for when I came out of Sabbath. It all slotted in very nicely, as it happens.” He added: “We all parted on amicable terms.” 

Not quite. Butler, who now insisted that it was never part of their original plan to call the hookup with Gillan Black Sabbath, publicly accused the singer of staying just long enough to raise his profile in America before rejoining Purple. Disillusioned and depressed, Butler also threatened to leave the band. 

Only Iommi, stone-faced and coked-out, was prepared to try to keep the show on the road. The last original Sabbath member still standing, he was now living in a penthouse apartment on Sunset Boulevard with his new girlfriend, former Runaways guitarist and now solo artist Lita Ford . They had begun an affair when Ford supported Sabbath on some of the Born Again dates and had moved in together in 1984. 

Despite the guitarist still being married to his second wife, Melinda, with whom he’d had a daughter, Toni, in 1983, then split from soon after, Iommi now proposed to Ford, who accepted and began making plans for a wedding in which the bride would be resplendent in a black wedding dress. She even made an album, with Iommi producing, tentatively titled The Bride Wore Black , but it was never released.

Ford was not a coke fiend like Iommi. “It was a shame,” he admitted, “because I messed up the relationship by being constantly out of it.” He knew he’d gone too far, he said, when he and Sabbath’s keyboard player Geoff Nicholls were writing in the penthouse one day and decided they should chain the front door and place furniture up against it, “because you get paranoid when you do a lot of coke. We were working on this song when we heard a loud bang. It was Lita.” 

When Iommi later invited Ford’s regular drummer Eric Singer to join Sabbath, it was the last straw. They split soon after.

Back in April ’84, with drummer Bill Ward fresh out of rehab and Butler reluctantly agreeing to return too, the search for a new singer was back on. This time, instead of moving for an established star singer – before calling on Gillan they had approached and been turned down by both Robert Plant and David Coverdale – they invited hopefuls to send in tapes, which Iommi and Butler would then listen to, and invite any that really stood out to come for an audition. This led to the farcical situation of one singer who, Iommi recalled, “we thought was amazing” being invited on the strength of a tape that, it turned out, he didn’t actually sing on. 

“We were in the rehearsal room,” Iommi remembers. “Me and Geezer are looking at each other going: ‘What’s this? This guy can’t sing! But he sounded so good on the tape!’” It wasn’t until later, when they played back the cassette, that their prospective new singer informed them that it wasn’t actually his voice on the tape, and that they’d been listening to the wrong side of the cassette. 

Next it was announced on MTV that 24-year old American singer/guitarist Ron Keel was the new singer in Black Sabbath. Another mistake. According to Keel: “I demoed some of the material and we hung out for a few days. They went through a bunch of other singers, but all they really wanted was Ozzy.” 

Finally, in May 1984, they thought they’d found The One when a 30-year-old former male model named David Donato auditioned. Tall, toned, LA-tan, with long ringlets of hair running down his back, if he sounded as good as he looked he was in, Iommi decided.

Unfortunately he didn’t, his voice somewhere between a downscale Dio and an asthmatic Gillan. Donato looked better than either of them, though, and was significantly younger, and Iommi felt coke-confident enough to schedule a full-scale announcement of Donato’s appointment as Sabbath’s new singer, via a soon to be notorious interview with Kerrang! featuring a spread of glamour shots of a pouting, hair-teased Donato, who told the writer: “It all seems to be going very smoothly. I always had a picture of what the right singer in Sabbath should be – and it was me!”

A month later, Donato was out of the band. Embarrassed, Iommi then claimed he’d never really been in it. “The Donato thing never should have gone that far,” he said.“We went public before we were sure about it.”

The October 18th 1984 issue of KERRANG breaks the incredibly sad news that Black Sabbath have parted ways with singer, David Donato 😢Wait... who? #rock #mystery pic.twitter.com/MG08nRqcGy October 18, 2023

It didn’t really matter what had happened, the fallout from the Donato debacle was intense. “Everything turned into chaos,” Iommi said.

That chaos escalated still further when Bill Ward – yet again – walked out, vowing that this time it was for good. “I had the same feelings I’d had when Ronnie and Ian were in the band,” he later explained. “It just didn’t feel the same as it had with Ozzy. I knew there was no way back.”

When Butler, exasperated by the shambles, followed Ward out the door, it seemed like that was it.

“Geezer had been writing stuff that didn’t sound like Sabbath at all and he was just fed up and wanted to try that stuff out somewhere else,” Iommi claimed, trying to save face.

When Butler then began shopping around a demo he’d made with David Donato to major labels, it only brought more confusion to the increasingly bedraggled Sabbath saga.

Even hard man Iommi now began to falter, no matter what Geoff Nicholls might have told him as they sat there at Tony’s penthouse doing coke all day and night and writing songs for a Sabbath album the guitarist now knew in his bones was not going to happen.

By the end of 1984, Iommi was working with 34-year-old singer Jeff Fenholt, who’d starred in the title role of the original Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar . Some of their demo material would later surface as finished Sabbath tracks – but with Fenholt’s voice and lyrics excavated. 

It was later claimed that Fenholt – who soon after “found God” and became a TV evangelist – was forced to drop out of the project after becoming conflicted with the band’s supposedly ‘satanic’ image. Fenholt countered those claims by suggesting it was a row with Sabbath manager Don Arden that almost led to the pair brawling that spurred his exit. Again, Iommi attempted to cover his tracks by insisting Fenholt was never a fully fledged Sabbath member. 

The toxicity surrounding the Sabbath name was such that they would spend the remainder of the 80s reduced to a blur of line-ups, a string of forgettable albums, and the end of their viability as a touring act in the US. 

Rubbing salt into the wound was the huge success in 1984 of all three of Sabbath’s former singers. Ozzy’s Bark At The Moon album, released in November 1983, was another multiplatinum hit, his ’84 US tour, with newbies Mötley Crüe in support, the most lucrative of his career. Sales of Dio’s The Last In Line , released in July, also left Sabbath in the dust. Even Ian Gillan’s album with Deep Purple, Perfect Strangers , outdid Sabbath by some distance, hitting the US Top Five in December 

Far from born again, Sabbath now appeared to be dead. But, as the following 40 years have proved, appearances can be deceptive…

Mick Wall is the UK's best-known rock writer, author and TV and radio programme maker, and is the author of numerous critically-acclaimed books, including definitive, bestselling titles on Led Zeppelin ( When Giants Walked the Earth ), Metallica ( Enter Night ), AC/DC ( Hell Ain't a Bad Place To Be ), Black Sabbath ( Symptom of the Universe ), Lou Reed, The Doors ( Love Becomes a Funeral Pyre ), Guns N' Roses and Lemmy. He lives in England.

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• Needs Tour Dates
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Born Again Tour

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Born Again Tour was the tour for Born Again .

• 1 Typical Setlist
• 2 Tour Dates
• 4 Personnel
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Typical Setlist [ ]

Tour dates [ ], songlist [ ], personnel [ ].

• Ian Gillan : Vocals
• Tony Iommi : Guitar

References [ ]

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Back in 1983 former member of Deep Purple Ian Gillan was taking a break from singing about smoke on the water to lend his vocal talents to Black Sabbath. Their former lead singer, and once again lead singer, as well as reality TV show host, John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne had left in 1979, mumbling about musical differences, to front his own band, Blizzard of Oz. Ian and Black Sabbath had recorded a new album which they were inspired to call, Born Again . The album cover featured a baby painted red with two little yellow fangs as well as rather fetching yellow-painted fingernails – is it any wonder heavy metal causes the odd raised eyebrow?

The band planned to tour North America on the strength of their new album and called a meeting to discuss the stage set, always central to any rock bands live show. In another piece of inspired thinking bass player, Geezer Butler suggested that a life-size model of Stonehenge be built and then erected on stage from where the Sabs could entertain their vast legion of fans with some of their new material. Amongst the tracks on Born Again is a 1 minute 58 second, far from classic, song entitled Stonehenge , along with Digital Bitch , Zero the Hero and the obligatory title track. It all added up to what is not necessarily their finest hour.

Week-long rehearsals were arranged at the Maple Leaf hockey stadium in Montreal where the henge set was erected and the band went through their paces. As the week was drawing to a close a dwarf turned up and was promptly dressed in a red leotard and given little yellow fangs to cap his teeth. At the final day’s dress rehearsal the dwarf was placed astride the highest stone and as the music reached a crescendo a pre-recorded scream rang out and the dwarf fell backwards off the henge onto a pile of mattresses that were discretely placed out of sight of where the audience were to sit. At which point bells start tolling, roadies dressed as monks start crawling across the front of the stage and the wistful tones of Sabbath’s 1970 classic  War Pigs began….. “Hello, MONTREAL!”

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Michael from the Mighty Hills of Munnsville

April 2, 2015 at 2:39 pm

I’m quite sure by now the vast legions of hockey fans from across Canada and Newfoundland (not to mention here in the U.S.) have scolded you about the major gaf you wrote in this piece of the Maple Leaf hockey stadium in MONTREAL…. The Maple Laffs (NOT a type-O) are in Toronto.

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TONY IOMMI Urges BLACK SABBATH Fans To Be Patient For 'Born Again' Remix

During an appearance on this past Thursday's (June 22) episode of SiriusXM 's "Trunk Nation With Eddie Trunk" , Tony Iommi spoke about his plans to remix BLACK SABBATH 's "Born Again" album for future release.

Issued in August 1983, "Born Again" was the only album SABBATH recorded with lead vocalist Ian Gillan , best known for his work with DEEP PURPLE . It was also the last of SABBATH 's studio albums to feature drummer Bill Ward .

Regarding when fans can expect the remixed version of "Born Again" , Iommi said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET ): "As soon as I mentioned [that we were contemplating remixing it], people think, oh, I'm working straight on it. Well, no, because you have to get through the [other SABBATH albums from the catalog] first to get to that. We have got the tapes now to 'Born Again' . They are being transferred from reel-to-reel to digital so we can get a proper look at it. But, again, it all takes time and it has to be done in stages. We're hoping to release all the stuff at some point; it's just a matter of going through it bit by bit, really. And I know people get anxious [and go], 'Where is it? Where is it? Where is it?' I'd love to be like that. I'd like to say, 'Yes, it's here.' But it just takes time to release it. You've gotta release it in stages."

As for what kind of changes he expects to be made to "Born Again" during the remixing process, Iommi said: "Well, when it was originally recorded, in the studio it sounded great; we loved it. But we went on tour then and somehow the sound got muffled. And whether it was from the pressing or what, I don't know. But I'd like to look at that. I have heard, when I played the 'Born Again' album, there's parts where I go, 'Oh, that should have been louder,' 'This should have been more prominent' — drums or whatever it may have been. There's things that really need adjusting on it, because there's some really good songs on that album too. But it would be nice to give it an up-to-date quality now, of what you can do now, and be able to listen to it differently. Because, obviously, when you're involved with this stuff at the time, you're hearing nothing but it, and then you leave it into somebody else's hands, like we did with that. We went on tour, [came] back and heard it, and we went, 'Oh my God. What happened?' We don't want that to happen. I want to be able to pull the tapes out again and really give it a good listen to and see what we need to adjust and change and make it a better-sounding album."

According to Tony , there are more SABBATH reissues on the way, including the albums the band recorded with singer Tony Martin during the late 1980s and early 1990s. "Yeah, there'll be stuff coming," he said. "If I say something, people expect it there and then. But you can't do it that quick. You have to go through the routine of, like, now we're on the [ Ronnie James ] Dio package, and then it'll move on and move on. The idea is, yes, the Tony Martin stuff will be coming out. And I'm looking forward to that as well, 'cause there's a lot of great stuff on there that got overlooked and that people wouldn't know of and didn't even know that there was an album out with Tony Martin , a lot of people, and it'd be nice to be able to show that again."

Last November, Gillan was asked by Spain's RockFM if it's true that he broke "Born Again" when he first got a copy of it. He responded: "I didn't break it. I threw it out the window of my car. [ Laughs ]

"Look, I was disappointed," he explained. "I didn't have the mentality of all the guys in BLACK SABBATH . I loved it. I had a fantastic year; it was insane. But when we finished the mixes… I still have a cassette at my home of the monitor mixes of 'Born Again', and it sounds fantastic — just on a cassette. And that's the last thing I heard in the recording studio. When I heard the album, I went, 'What is this?' The bass rumble was a bit too much for me.

"There's a famous line in a famous movie called 'This Is Spinal Tap' that has two or three references to BLACK SABBATH in it," Gillan added. "And I don't know where these may have come from [ laughs ], but one of them was 'This album in unplayable on American radio,' because of the bass end. And so it was — unplayable on the radio.

"I was disappointed in the final production mix," Ian clarified. "I don't know what happened between the studio and the factory, but something happened. So that was a disappointment. Having said that, I love some of the songs on there. And 'Trashed' is one of my favorite rock and roll songs of all time, and even more so because it's a completely true story. [ Laughs ]"

Gillan also reflected on his touring activity with SABBATH , saying: "I was with BLACK SABBATH for a year and I sang Ozzy Osbourne songs as well as the songs from 'Born Again' . And I never felt right doing that. It was great — I could sing them okay — but I didn't sound like Ozzy . There was something not quite right."

Following the departure of lead singer Ronnie James Dio and drummer Vinny Appice after the studio mixing of the "Live Evil" album, BLACK SABBATH was once again on the lookout for yet another lead vocalist to fill the significant void left at stage front. The band turned to Gillan .

The resultant album and live touring certainly made for one of the more curious associations in the world of heavy metal. Much of this era of BLACK SABBATH has passed into rock folklore and was actually the source for the material used in the rockumentary movie "This Is Spinal Tap" . From the replica stage production of Stonehenge, which was too large for some of the venues on the world tour, to the employment of a dwarf to dress up and play the part of the "devil-baby" from the LP front cover, the world of BLACK SABBATH took on a distinct air of the surreal.

While the well-received "Born Again" album and live dates succeeded in stoking the embers and kept the SABBATH flames burning, this would ultimately be a marriage built more on friendship and respect as opposed to any long-standing and compatible musical association. After one tour, Ian Gillan would eventually bid farewell and re-join his old sparring partners for the Mk. II reunion of DEEP PURPLE and leave BLACK SABBATH once more gazing into the crystal ball hoping the face of yet another lead vocalist would reveal itself.

For Iommi , Geezer Butler , Ward , Gillan , and keyboardist Geoff Nicholls , work would swiftly commence in May of '83 at the Manor Studios in the village of Shiptonon-Cherwell, Oxfordshire. Produced by BLACK SABBATH and co-producer Robin Black , who had also worked on 1975's "Sabotage" , 1976's "Technical Ecstasy" , and 1978's "Never Say Die" , SABBATH 's eleventh studio release would represent a radical departure from the gloomy atmospherics and blackened lyricism that had forged their identity and spawned innumerable descendants.

Gillan 's approach to songwriting bespoke a lighter-hearted approach to what had, until then, been the primary concern of Butler . Album opener "Trashed" , for instance, was inspired by Gillan 's boozed-up race around the Manor 's grounds in Bill Ward 's car that ended in near-catastrophe and a wrecked vehicle. "Disturbing The Priest" was the result of a door in the studio having been left open during playback, and a local vicar appearing in the doorway asking for the volume to be turned down as it was disturbing choir practice in the adjacent village.

For all of its off-kilter appearance however, "Born Again" was still SABBATH through and through. Musically twisted and possessed with more than a whiff of brimstone, the album is a thrilling glimpse into an alternative world.

In a 2018 interview with SiriusXM , Gillan said that "Born Again" began with a bender at the Bear Inn, one of the oldest pubs in Oxford, England.

"How it started is was just 'cause we got drunk together one night," the DEEP PURPLE frontman said. "I went for a drink with Tony and Geezer , and we ended up under the table. And I can't remember much more that happened. But I got a call from my manager the next day saying, 'Don't you think you should call me if you're gonna make decisions like this?' I said, 'What are you talking about?' He said, 'Well, apparently you… I just got a call. You agreed to join SABBATH .' So that's how it happened. I was at a kind of loose end anyway, having just finished with my own band and PURPLE not really being anything viable at the time. So we set a one-year plan, and it was to do an album and a tour. Nobody knew what was gonna happen, so we pitched up and I pitched my tent, literally, at the old manor in Oxfordshire. And we made an album. I didn't see much of 'em. They were night people, so they slept all day and worked all night. I got up in the morning, cooked my breakfast, went to the studio to hear what they had recorded the night before and write a song over it. And that's how the album was made."

Gillan went on to describe the making of "Born Again" as "a challenge for me. It was a bit like doing [ Andrew Lloyd Webber 's rock opera] 'Jesus Christ Superstar' or singing with [opera singer Luciano ] Pavarotti ; it's just something completely different," he explained. "But Tony is such a great writer. You know what to expect with Tony . There's no multidirectional approach. He is the father of everything that came out of Seattle, I believe. He's just very direct, and that's how he evolved from the early days.

"I found it very easy to sing and write songs with [ Tony ]," Ian continued. "And we had a couple of good ones. There was always a narrative. My favorite song from that album is 'Trashed' , which was a true story about a racetrack and too much drink and spinning a car and crashing it and going upside down. It was exciting times."

The second track on "Born Again" was a brief instrumental called "Stonehenge" , and on SABBATH 's 1983 tour, the band hilariously had to shelve a Stonehenge stage concept because the scenery was much too big to use.

"We had a production company called Light And Sound Design ; they were in Birmingham, where the band was based," Gillan recalled. "And after rehearsal one day, we had a kind of meeting to go the office, and as we were walking through these corridors, one of the guys said, 'By the way, anyone got any idea of a concept for a stage set or anything?' And Geezer Butler said, 'Yeah. Stonehenge.' And the guy said, 'Wow! That's great.' He said, 'How do you visualize it?' And Geezer said, 'Well, lifesize, of course.' We didn't quite go lifesize, but it was about two-thirds. And we could never get it all up on a stage. We played some huge arenas, and places, stadiums, and you couldn't get it [up there]. So there are parts of it, there are monoliths that are all lying around in docklands somewhere and are spotted around the world, as far as I know."

A longtime treasure among hardcore SABBATH fans, "Born Again" was re-released in the spring of 2011 as a special two-CD set featuring a 1983 live performance from the Reading Festival .

At the time of its initial release, "Born Again" was a commercial success. It was the highest-charting BLACK SABBATH album in the United Kingdom since "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" and became an American Top 40 hit. Despite this, it became the first BLACK SABBATH album to not have any RIAA certification (gold or platinum) in the U.S.

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“He’d got it down to a tee. He wore one of my jackets, a wig, a mustache and I’m playing behind him”: Tony Iommi once dressed his guitar tech up as himself and sent him onstage as a prank on Sabbath singer Tony Martin

The real Tony Iommi played while hiding behind a stack, and the fake Iommi nearly got away with it

In a recent interview posted to Tony Iommi's YouTube account, Iommi and Tony Martin have discussed the pranks they played on each other while on tour with Black Sabbath. They mention a particular prank, which included Iommi dressing up one of his guitar techs as him and sending the fake Iommi out on stage.

“They must have planned it for weeks. I was not expecting that, ’cos I'm being all serious, like I said 'Mr. Tony Iommi' and then walks Andy [on stage],” said Martin.

Iommi continued, “Obviously he'd seen how I walk, and he got it all off to a tee. He wore one of my jackets, put a wig on, mustache...goes out and I'm playing behind him. I'm playing the stack and he's out the front, and nobody sussed it was him first.”

Martin relates how he turned around, noticed that “guitar's on the wrong way round” and realized it wasn't Iommi after all.

Besides the well-thought-out pranks, life in Black Sabbath wasn't short of amusing mishaps – one of them even inspired the 1984 cult classic This Is Spinal Tap . In his 2011 memoir Iron Man: My Journey through Heaven and Hell with Black Sabbath , Iommi explained how the band ordered a 'Stonehenge' set for the stage .

“When we were thinking about the stage set for our Born Again tour, Geezer [Butler, Sabbath's bass guitar player] said: 'Why don't we have something that looks like Stonehenge, you know, with stones and all that stuff?'

“Geezer jotted down what it should look like and gave it to the designers. Two or three months later we saw it. We rehearsed for the tour at the Birmingham NEC and we said: 'Oh great, the stage set is going to come today!'”

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“It came in and we couldn't believe it. It was as big as the real Stonehenge,” Iommi remembers. “They had taken Geezer's measurements the wrong way and thought it was meant to be life-size. I said, 'How the bloody hell did that happen?'”

This mishap became a source of inspiration for the now-iconic Stonehenge scene in Spinal Tap .

The Tony Martin-Tony Iommi interview celebrates the long-awaited Martin-era box set, Black Sabbath: Anno Domini 1989-1995 , which will be released on May 31. It is available to pre-order now.

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Janelle is a staff writer at GuitarWorld.com. After a long stint in classical music, Janelle discovered the joys of playing guitar in dingy venues at the age of 13 and has never looked back. Janelle has written extensively about the intersection of music and technology, and how this is shaping the future of the music industry. She also had the pleasure of interviewing Dream Wife, K.Flay, Yīn Yīn, and Black Honey, among others. When she's not writing, you'll find her creating layers of delicious audio lasagna with her art-rock/psych-punk band ĠENN .

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Moody Blues Cofounder Mike Pinder, Last Surviving Original Member of Band, Dies at 82

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Mike Pinder , the Moody Blues ’ longtime keyboardist and the last surviving founding member of the Rock Hall-inducted band, has died at the age of 82. Pinder’s family announced his death via a statement shared by the group’s bassist John Lodge, stating that Pinder had died peacefully on Wednesday at his home in Northern California home. No cause of death was announced.

Their statement described him as a “musician, father, cosmic philosopher & friend” who “lived his life with a childlike wonder, walking a deeply introspective path which fused the mind and the heart.”

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The group went on hiatus in the mid-1970s — with Pinder releasing a solo album titled “The Promise” — and returned for their 1978 reunion album “Octave,” but chose not to remain with the band. He had relocated to Northern California with his family and worked in the tech industry, returning to music only occasionally and releasing a second solo album in 1994. He appeared with the group when it was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame but did not speak. Some fans perceived this as disapproval of the Hall, but he later said it was because the ceremony already had gone on for too long.

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