Tony Iommi says his lymphoma has not come back. Speaking to Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM's "Trunk Nation" on September 2, the BLACK SABBATH guitarist — now 78 — gave the plainest answer available on the subject: "as far as the cancer is concerned, it's stayed away at the moment."
He was not overselling it. "It's — touch wood — all right so far. I still go for more of my checks," he said. "I have scans and this, that and the other. But they're a good team, the doctors I've got, and they keep me going."
The diagnosis came in 2012, in the middle of the run-up to SABBATH's reunion. Iommi described the timing in a Guitar World interview a year later: "The diagnosis came when I was doing my book tour in 2011 before we started rehearsal." What followed was one of the odder feats of endurance in the band's history — "13" was written and recorded, and the touring cycle behind it carried on, while Iommi flew home from wherever the band happened to be for treatment, structuring an entire album campaign around a chemotherapy schedule.
Fourteen years of periodic scans later, the news is that there is no news, which in oncology is the good outcome.
Meanwhile there is a record to talk about. Iommi releases "From The Dark" on October 23 through BMG — his first solo album in twenty-one years, since "Fused" in 2005. Jorn Lande sings on it, Becky Baldwin of MERCYFUL FATE plays bass and Karl Brazil drums.
The lead single from it, "World Alone", is out today as a limited-edition seven-inch. Iommi has already talked through the video that goes with it, a dystopian piece built around a video-game framing and a character called the Beast; the single now exists as a physical object, which for a guitarist whose entire body of work was released on vinyl before it was released on anything else is not an incidental detail.
That "From The Dark" exists at all is the same story as the health update, told a different way. Iommi lost the fingertips of his right hand in a sheet-metal factory at seventeen, invented an entire way of playing around the injury, and then invented most of what heavy metal sounds like on top of it. Forty-something albums and one lymphoma diagnosis later, he is still filing new work.