Tony Iommi has told Classic Rock that he turned down the chance to record one last BLACK SABBATH album with the band's original lineup — a proper follow-up to 2013's "13", with Bill Ward back behind the kit.
The offer came from Andrew Watt, the producer who handled Ozzy Osbourne's final two solo albums, 2020's "Ordinary Man" and 2022's "Patient Number 9". Watt approached Iommi in the early 2020s.
"I'd met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy," Iommi said. "He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn't know what it was like working with the original SABBATH, working with Bill. Also, we'd done '13', and I didn't like the idea of: 'Now here's another album.'"
The middle clause carries the weight. "13" was the first SABBATH album in 35 years to feature Ozzy, Iommi and Geezer Butler together, and it did something no SABBATH record had ever managed in the United States: it went to No. 1 on the Billboard chart in June 2013. In the U.K. it also entered at No. 1 — the band's first chart-topper there since "Paranoid" in October 1970, 43 years earlier.
But Ward was not on it. He had been in for the 2011 reunion, then stepped away in early 2012 over what he called an "unsignable contract" that did not reflect what he had contributed to the band. RAGE AGAINST THE MACHINE's Brad Wilk played the album's drum tracks; Ozzy's touring drummer Tommy Clufetos covered the live dates.
SABBATH did announce a follow-up at the time, and hinted they had songs ready. Butler said in 2014 that four tracks were left over from the sessions: "So maybe we'll fill in the other four or five tracks and put out another album — if it's right. We wouldn't do it just for the sake of it, or the money or whatever."
Ozzy eventually confirmed the plan had been scrapped in favour of the farewell tour that launched in early 2016, and his reasoning was pure chart arithmetic. "We were gonna do one before the tour, but it would take three or four years to write and record an album," he said. "If we did an album and it went to No. 2, people would go, 'It's over.' There's only one more place you can go after No. 1 and that's No. 2."
He was never entirely at peace with how "13" turned out, either. "I didn't really get a charge from the album," he told Stereogum in 2022. "It was like stepping back in time, but it wasn't a glorious period." And then the part that hangs over Watt's offer: "The only thing I really regret, to be honest, is that Bill Ward didn't play on the album. It wasn't really a BLACK SABBATH album. I'm not saying that one day we might not all go in a room and come up with the perfect BLACK SABBATH album."
That day is not coming. Ozzy died in July 2025, which turns Watt's pitch from a declined offer into the last chance any of them had at the record all four were, at various points, on record as wanting. Iommi — the one who had actually lived through the making of "13" — is the one who closed the door.