Iron Man (14 page)

To make matters worse, the club was closing and we had to get out. Sloopy's was upstairs and the stairs to the exit were steep. On our way out John grabbed the owner of the club around the neck and of course the bloke fell down the stairs. He hurt himself so he wasn't very happy. Our driver and me finally managed to get Bonham out of the club and into the car, and we took him home first. When we got to John's house he didn't have his keys on him. It was four o'clock in the morning. I pressed the doorbell: nothing.
Again: nothing. Then the lights went on upstairs. His wife, Pat, opened a window and shouted: ‘He's not coming in!'

I said: ‘Pat, please, let him in. I'm getting married in the morning and he's got to be there.'

‘He's not coming in!'

‘Please!'

Finally Pat said: ‘All right, but he's not coming upstairs then! If he's coming in, he can sleep downstairs.'

‘Okay.'

She came down, opened the door and ran straight back upstairs. We carried John in, put him in the hallway, sat him against a radiator and I said to him: ‘You're not going to make it tomorrow, are you?'

He put his thumb up and slurred: ‘Yeah, I'll be there.'

The driver took me home and I thought, bloody hell, John's never going to turn up and I'll be without a best man.

I had to be there at some silly hour and I couldn't believe it: eight o'clock sharp I saw Bonham coming up the drive, with his top hat and tails on, all dressed up. He lived a good thirty-five minutes from my house and I hadn't even had a shave or anything yet. I opened the door and he was all chipper and energetic, going: ‘I'm ready. Are you?'

I actually felt worse than him. We got in the car and of course we immediately did a quick couple of toots. I thought, oh dear, so this is how the day is going to be. We got to the bloody church and, before we went in, all our lot kept disappearing behind the building, one after the other, having a line. Come back, snort and go: ‘Right!'

And then somebody else would go: ‘I'll be back in a minute.'

On my wife's side they were wondering where they kept going off to and I was thinking, Christ, I can't do this! Once inside, my friends were all sniffing and snorting, all those sounds going on in the church, it was terrible. And then you had her side, all immaculate and straight.

I had written this instrumental thing called ‘Fluff '. They played the tape when Susan walked down the isle and it started going wrong. First it came on and then it went off and it came on again and everybody started giggling. A total disaster.

When the guy said: ‘Is there anybody here who's got anything to say about why these two should not be joined in matrimony?' I was convinced somebody was going to shout out. But they didn't. They were just sneering. I was bloody glad to get out of that church.

When we got back to the house for the reception, they were all disappearing again. More lines. My mother-in-law said: ‘It's funny, none of your friends are eating.'

Of course I said: ‘Oh really? I wonder why.'

John Bonham and Ozzy and a few others were notorious drinkers who'd play up once they'd had a few. That's why we thought it best just to have a toast in champagne and after that not to have any more alcohol. It really didn't go down very well. We had the champagne toast and then a top-up with apple juice and Bonham spat it out and went: ‘Fucking apple juice!'

Susan's side never swore, so I thought, oh no, this will upset the cart. My mother saved the day. She said to Bonham: ‘Don't worry, John. We'll go back to my house. I've got plenty of booze there.'

They all sneaked off to Mum's house and carried on drinking there. If it weren't for her there would have probably been antiques going through the walls, on account of all that apple juice.

Susan didn't want to live in my house in Stafford, so we decided to move to a place between London and Birmingham. We were looking at houses to buy, but couldn't find anything we liked. One day her dad said: ‘Why don't you come and live here? This house is far too big for us.'

Sue went: ‘That's an idea.'

And so we did. We had a major part of this massive, 200-room house. My father-in-law built a partition between their living quarters and ours and we lived there for quite a few years.

Just like in Carlisle, we weren't the only ones there. I saw an apparition going up the stairs one night. It wasn't like a three-dimensional person, it was more like a figure. And I had more weird things happening there. We had these big, old-fashioned keys in the doors to all the bedrooms. I was in the lounge one night and I had my briefcase open. I closed it and I went upstairs to bed. I heard this big bang and ran downstairs again. One of the big paintings had fallen off the wall. I walked into the lounge and my briefcase was open. And I went to open the door and the keys had gone. All of them. Never found them again. I talked about this to my in-laws and they said: ‘Yeah, there is a ghost here. But he's a friendly ghost.'

Things like that make you really think. A poltergeist, for a start, can be horrible, but . . . they can move an object! I've always been able to see things that most other people can't. It's hard to talk about it, because people think, right, he's had too many drugs. But I actually did see things, like the Carlisle ghost. Saw him as clear as day.

I always wondered about what happens when you die, when you're beyond this world, and tried to find information about that in books. While living at the big house, I read a lot of books by Lobsang Rampa. He was a writer who claimed to have been a Tibetan monk before spending his later years in the body of an Englishman, or so he wrote. I started getting into all this leaving the body stuff, astral travelling. I really believed in it and that made me want to do it. I planned it and thought about it and I tried it a few times, but nothing happened. When I finally managed to do it for the first time, I came out of my body and, with a jolt, suddenly jumped back in. You feel it pulling you back as your astral is leaving your body; you feel this pull up your spine. I must have got frightened and I came straight back in.

Once I had done that I was determined to make it work properly. I kept practising. You've got to be by yourself in a room and you have to really, really relax, but not to the point of falling asleep, because you have to stay conscious. And then you will yourself to leave. At first it's funny, because you feel like you're falling. Most people have had that feeling when in bed. You go, oohh: you experience a jolt. That's when your astral comes back in your body when you dream. You're asleep and you're just about to leave your body, and if you move, whoof, it comes straight back in and you get that jolt.

After a while it worked. I came out my body. It was weird. I floated around the room and looked down on myself from the ceiling. And I could leave the room, go through walls and go off
to the roof. It sounds mad, but once I even went along the beach.

You come back. You're attached by a silver cord that pulls you back. If that's ever severed, you don't, so it can be risky. When you dream and your astral leaves your body, and an entity is in the lower-class astral, and it pulls on your silver cord and annoys you, you get these horrible dreams. It could be caused by drugs or drink, just anything. I know it sounds odd, but I have experienced all that and it opened another world to me.

I don't know why I don't do it any more. I didn't follow it through. I have actually tried it a couple of times and: nothing. I can't leave my body any more. But in those days I could do it quite easily. I got to a point where I could do it without falling asleep.

I still believe you can go to a non-physical plane of existence. When you die you can go there, and you can look back on your life in a thing called the akashic records. I really think that's what happens: you can go and see whether you've achieved what you wanted to achieve, and if not you can be born into another body and try again . . .

Back to the reality of living in that huge house, I tried to rebuild and redecorate it. I phoned up this one company and I saw this painter and decorator's van come up the long drive. He came to the house, looked at it, turned around and drove straight off. I just couldn't find the people who could take on a place that size, so I had to get contractors in who normally did schools. You wouldn't be able to buy huge properties like that any more, but in those days they were still quite affordable. And now it's a wonderful hotel, Kilworth House. The old snooker room is now the dining room, and the conservatory is still intact as there were only three of those in the country and there is a preservation order on it. All I did with it at the time was grow tomatoes in it, and some exotic plants. But probably the most exotic thing in that place at the time
was a long-haired guy from Aston, who only a few years earlier had shared his tiny bedroom with a lodger who came from nowhere, a million boxes of peas and a phone that kept disappearing.

On 2 January 1973, we flew off to New Zealand for the Great Ngaruawahia Music Festival of Peace near Hamilton City, followed by a few shows in Australia. On our way there the plane stopped in New Delhi and bloody Singapore and everywhere in between and beyond, and we'd have to get off the plane, wait an hour, get on again. It took forever. We got pissed, sober, pissed, sober . . .

At this Ngaruawahia Festival somebody erected a huge cross on a hill and set it on fire. I don't know why he did this, but it looked really good. I can't remember much else about that. The trip to it is still etched on my mind, but the memory of the gig itself must have gone up in flames together with that cross.

After New Zealand we had a gap before the next shows in Australia. Patrick Meehan said: ‘Let's take a break and go to Fiji!'

So off we went. Again, it was a real pig to get there and after we landed the drive along a dirt track to the hotel in the middle of nowhere was diabolical. It was a lovely place, close to an equally lovely beach, but at night it took on another life.

This hotel had an outside bar. There were no drugs at all in Fiji, but there was plenty of drinking going on. In the middle of the
night I went back to my room and there were so many bugs and cockroaches scurrying across the footpath that walking along all you'd be hearing was ‘crunch, crunch'. I went into my room and I got into bed. I put the light out to go to sleep and I felt something on my chest. I put my hand there and it was a cockroach about three inches long. I shot up, put the light on and I could hear ‘krrch, krrch' – all of them running across the stone floor to go down this drain in the room. It was absolutely awful. In a panic I phoned the reception, screaming: ‘Get over here!'

This guy wandered in, all casual, with a tin of spray. He gave me the tin and off he went, just like, well, what's he moaning about?

I said: ‘Is that it?'

You couldn't kill them either. It's like they were made of stone. I was hitting them with my shoe, and it was just like . . . nothing. Still going ‘krrrrch!' A bloody army of them.

Horrible!

In Fiji it was also the first and the last time we all played golf. We were merrily shanking our way to the first green when I saw this toad hopping around and I picked it up. This bloke came running towards me, screaming: ‘No, no, no!'

Apparently this was a deadly poisonous toad. It had all this stuff coming out on to my hand. I shot back to the hotel in a panic, to wash it off in a hurry.

Meanwhile, Bill stepped into an anthill and suddenly all these ants were marching up his leg. They bit him so he was dancing all over the place, going: ‘Aah, uh, oh, oohh!'

A leisurely game of golf and I nearly got poisoned to death and so did Bill. We packed up after that. I don't think we even made it past the second hole.

Apart from all that, it was lovely in Fiji. We went out on a boat, sat on the beach and then to this bar at night, just doing the things you do while on a holiday.

But I never got a proper night's sleep there.

We'd had such a great time doing
Volume 4
in Los Angeles, and we wanted to recreate the experience for what was to become our next album,
Sabbath Bloody Sabbath
. We all went back to LA and rented the same house. After us ruining the place the first time, John Dupont must have got a wad of money to allow us back. We also returned to the Record Plant, but the room was different.

‘What's happened? It's really small now!'

‘Oh, we built this Moog in here for Stevie Wonder.'

‘Oh, no!'

Back at the house I tried to come up with ideas, but I couldn't think of anything. I don't know what it was. I just couldn't get it. Then I started panicking: ‘Oh, no, what am I going to do!'

Up until that time, when we went somewhere to write and rehearse, I felt that most of the time everybody was dying to go down the pub instead of working at the songs. But you need to get stuff done. It's quite easy to sit around, telling jokes and boozing, but the money is going out of the window like this, sitting in some studio for bloody two grand a day or whatever it was. So I was really aware of that.

It was already getting harder around the time we were working
there on
Volume 4
, because we were established by then. In the past I'd say: ‘Come on, we've really got to work on this!'

The guys would listen to me, because I had always been looked on as the leader of the band. But at best I was a very reluctant leader. It was a role that eventually got to me, because if something went wrong I had to be the pillar everybody leaned on and to say: ‘Everything's fine, it's going to be all right.'