The guitarist who gave heavy metal its vocabulary is going back to the city that produced it — this time to talk rather than to play.
Tony Iommi will appear on stage at the Royal Birmingham Conservatoire on Thursday, September 17, for a one-night-only conversation about his career and about Birmingham itself. His host is Midlands sports broadcaster and journalist Gary Newbon MBE, and the evening is billed as gig anecdotes, tour stories and a look inside the making of music that travelled everywhere.
The timing is deliberate. Iommi has more than 45 albums to his name and is preparing to release his new solo album, "From The Dark", in October 2026. In June he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire — one more entry on a list that already includes multiple Grammy Awards, induction into the Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame, a doctorate from Coventry University, a Lord Mayor's Award and the Freedom Of The City Of Birmingham.
The story he will be telling starts with an industrial accident. As a teenager working in a Birmingham sheet-metal factory, Iommi lost the tips of two fingers on his fretting hand — an injury that forced him to build thimbles, slacken his strings, detune, and in the process invent the darker, heavier tone that BLACK SABBATH were built on. Formed with Ozzy Osbourne, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward, the band spent the 1970s writing the rulebook for everything that followed.
The six decades since have not been quiet. Iommi worked extensively with the late Ronnie James Dio, released acclaimed solo material, reunited the original SABBATH lineup for the chart-topping 2013 album "13", and closed that chapter with "The End" farewell tour of 2016–2017, which played to 1.6 million people.
More recently his work has spilled well outside metal venues. In 2023 he collaborated with the Birmingham Royal Ballet on "Black Sabbath - The Ballet", built from his early compositions. In 2025 BLACK SABBATH headlined "Back To The Beginning" in Birmingham, a homecoming and a farewell that took place only weeks before Osbourne's death.
For an evening about the city that started it all, the venue could hardly be better chosen: the Conservatoire sits a short walk from the streets where a factory accident accidentally rewrote music.
Source: blabbermouth.net