‘At last we’ve done it!’ Ex-Black Sabbath lead singer Tony Martin explains why he is Back To Eden.

He’s played gigs all over the world with some of the greatest rockers in the game. And yet Tony Martin’s next gig is making him ‘nervous’. Best known for his time fronting British metal behemoth Black Sabbath in the late ‘80s-early ‘90s releasing albums like Tyr and The Eternal Idol, Martin’s anxiety is based on an upcoming show with a band whose name is derived from his best and most famous Sabbath release, Headless Cross. On July 27^th Tony Martin's Headless Cross will make its live UK debut at the Birmingham Asylum (owned by Shy bassist Roy Davis), which is getting Martin all a tizzy. ‘Yeah, quite nervous. It’s quite a big thing really; I’ve tried for many years to get something in a solo fashion up and running and it’s taken me this long really to get a whole bunch of guys together that really, really work. So not only that, I’ve always been in my home country or in my home town with a band of some kind: Sabbath or the Whitesnake guys; Bernie Marsden, Micky Moody. I’ve always been with somebody and so this is the first time I’ve had a chance to really include all of that and my solo stuff all in one go. So it’s a bit nerve-wracking!’

Birmingham: the working-class roots of heavy metal buried in the Midlands of England. One of those bands who helped create a whole genre of music was birthed here, so too was one of their future stars. Does it feel like a homecoming show? ‘Not exactly homecoming,’ says Martin. ‘I don’t know how to explain it. When you’re in your first band and you’re dying to play your hometown it’s that, “at last, we made it!” rather than coming home. I’ve always lived here. Birmingham, the Midlands, has been my hometown my whole life. Traditionally it has been for Black Sabbath and quite a few other bands...it is like, “yay, at last we’ve done it!”’

Headless Cross is a band Martin put together for the sole purpose of putting on a white-hot show. No fuss, just rock. ‘If you think about it, in England everybody’s seen everything and America it’s like, “Ok, show me something I haven’t seen before,”’ explains Martin. ‘That’s not possible with the sort of budget and money that’s around in the business at the moment. But what we do have is a really, really amazing collection of songs from my history as a singer not just in Black Sabbath but in other things that I’ve done as well and those songs really come to life when they’re played [live]. So we’re going out on that really and the people in the band are great. Really, really nice bunch of guys.’

Those nice guys have an impressive music pedigree and decades of live experience with some of the best bands going including ex-members of Northern black metal unleashers Venom, the brick shit-house of a power metal band HammerFall and Black Sabbath, not including Martin himself. ‘Well obviously Geoff Nicholls [keyboards, Black Sabbath] is quite a dear friend of mine from the Sabbath days...and I never ever lost touch with Geoff. He’s the only person out of the whole band who still stayed in touch with me. The phone stopped ringing fifteen years ago and nobody spoke to me after that but Geoff did and we’ve stayed really close. He’s been in a couple of band formations with me; he’s just great, I love having him on stage. Magnus Rosen from HammerFall, well I was introduced to him a couple of years ago and just instantly liked the guy. He’s very, very amicable and calm, collected and really, really good with his bass. He’s got a really good attitude on stage. Dario Mollo obviously I’ve been working with him over the past twelve years with a project called The Cage and we just released a new album with that a couple of months ago. Danny [Needham] has been my drummer for some years. In the period that we haven’t been working together he’s been with Venom...so it’s great to have him back on board even if it’s just for this one gig at the minute. It’s just great to have everybody together.’

Like Martin said, Headless Cross’ performance at the Asylum will just be a one night gig. Great performance, brilliant songs and first-class musicians. If all goes well this could be a pre-cursor to a proper tour some time next year. Hopefully the planning will be better: ‘we were actually thrust into this gig kind of by accident,’ explains Martin. A festival appearance was scheduled before the promoter pulled the proverbial plug. In a panic, the band searched for somewhere to put on their show, after all this is a band that wants to play the songs of Tony Martin’s career as much as the fans want to hear it. The ideal location would be Birmingham and Roy Davis stepped in. Added to the bill is ex-Iron Maiden singer Blaze Bayley, a guy for whom Martin has a lot of respect, although not a good memory of meeting when I ask if they have crossed paths before. ‘You know what, I actually have but I don’t remember. He promises me that he did a support slot for me once years ago I just can not remember it! I did apologise to him for that but he said we had some things going when I was in a band called The Alliance and I just can’t remember it. But, yes we have crossed paths. I’m looking forward to hooking up with him because he sounds like a really nice guy anyway. Everyone I speak to says, “wow, cool!” because he’s a great artist and they all love what he does.’

Two of the biggest metal bands ever to come out of Britain will be well represented with Martin and Bayley. Both of them joined their respective bands keeping the flame burning at times when perhaps the light would have flickered or gone out. Getting the deserved recognition has never been easy to come by. ‘Not really!’ Laughs Martin when I ask if he feels they have been recognised for their previous work. ‘You can’t really say that I get any credit. I’ve been pretty much cut out of the whole Sabbath story over these past years; all my albums were taken off sale, they don’t really include me in any of the write ups or stories in books that get published and only the people who are fans of what we do are the people that carry it forward really. But I’m kind of past all that. It doesn’t hurt, it’s just surprising. It does make you wonder what they’re thinking. But I’m kind of past all that really.’

It seems Tony Martin is not the only ex-band member the powers that be at Sabbath HQ are trying to deny existence of. This year has been a near-constant airing of dirty laundry and an embarrassing handling of their reunion when original drummer Bill Ward was eventually left out. Martin has made no secret of the fact that during their time playing together when other relationships soured, Martin made a friend in Ward. ‘I did...I don’t quite get it; in one way it seems like bit of a publicity stunt but I do understand Bill where he’s at in that he played a real part in the band and they clearly – and I don’t know the details of the contracts or whatever they’ve talked about, I wasn’t privy to any of that – but they clearly don’t want to have him included in what they’re doing as much as he thinks he should be. I mean all of the years I spent around the guys in Sabbath they never had a bad word to say about Bill, they love him. They’ve always talked about him very fondly and so I don’t quite understand why they’ve sort of excluded him and Bill isn’t like a really vindictive person or a nasty guy or anything so it seems like a bit of a publicity stunt in some ways. Maybe they’re saving him for another reunion like later on when they’re going to finally get everybody together, I don’t know, and then give it another shot at playing the same old stuff again. But that’s cynical and it’s just from my point of view. Like I said, I wasn’t privy to any of their conversations, but I just don’t quite get it.’

With a big gig lined up and possible tour, a ‘mad’ third album by The Cage, his project with guitarist Dario Mollo, and a ‘bloody good’ Sliver Horses album, Tony Martin has a busy year ahead of him. But Martin is loathe to get too excited in an industry that is ‘a lot lost’. ‘Everything needs to change, absolutely everything,’ Martin explains. ‘I’ve studied this in the past few years with lawyers and union people. I’m not a big union guy but they was really impressed with what I was thinking and had to say...if you go back to what is traditionally the music business – sex, drugs and rock ‘n roll, ok that’s not really it anymore – I mean we lost control when everything started to go digital, really. Before that people were copying stuff and putting things out but when it became digital we just lost control of that - not in the same way that the games industry or the film industry [did]. They kind of held onto their thing a bit more than we did but also the business side of it, we lost control of that and it turns out from the lawyers and the union people that I speak to that traditionally we handed control over to the record companies to speak on our behalf and act on our behalf. They didn’t do that to protect the stuff that we make now. We are, whichever way you look at it, we are manufacturers, ok, so we make songs. Some people make fridges, some people make cars, but we still manufacture something. However, we can’t put a recommended retail price on our product like other people can because we handed over the job to the recording industry. Now we can’t really get it back, we kind of stuffed it. So now I think it’s time for the artist to reclaim the industry.’

Martin has clearly thought a lot about this and his whole demeanour changes. Sure he was excited when we spoke about the Birmingham gig but now he is really pumped. ‘How do we go about doing that?’ he continues. ‘Well for a start we have to stop giving stuff away for free. I mean there was some myths going around in recent years about how you boost your profile by giving stuff away for free. It doesn’t work. Basically all the people that like you get your stuff for free and then there’s nobody else to sell it to, so all you’ve done is given it away working for free. That doesn’t work because once you work for free then people expect you to work for free, so that doesn’t work. It’s a whole clawing back of what is right. What is right is that we should be able to earn a living out of it and don’t. What they should understand is that music isn’t for free, it costs people time, money, effort. And we do have a manufacturing right, we have made those things so the intellectual rights should belong to us and they don’t. So everything has to change. I think we should be doing more of our own thing and missing out the record labels completely. In some ways I think their day is done.

‘The other thing that’s killed it really is the single download thing where bands are still making albums and yet people go online and download one track. So you put all that effort and that work in to making a whole album and then one song is taken out of it. It maybe time for us to start doing a single track release rather than album release. Release the songs one at a time for example so that people get a chance to enjoy each track as they come along and not just diss the whole album and just take one track out of the whole bunch of work you’ve done. It would save you time and effort making the whole album. You’d get money off each track for example and maybe later on you could release them all again with, you know, four extra tracks and make it into a CD at that point. I think it just needs a new business model and a new thought process from artists and we really need to get on it because it’s become a worthless art and that’s just so not fair. It’s just not fair... if everybody gets on it and changes it then we’ll be in a much better shape I think.’