“It was an utterly ridiculous idea”: Geezer Butler on the embarrassing truth behind Black Sabbath’s infamous Stonehenge set, their unfortunate ‘devil baby’ and Spinal Tap
By Website Content Manager
“People often ask if I’ve seen the film This Is Spinal Tap. I always reply, ‘Seen it? I lived it’.”
In 1983, Black Sabbath found themselves in danger of being outflanked by not one, but two, of their former vocalists.
Having recruited Jake E. Lee as his new guitarist following the tragic passing of Randy Rhoads, Ozzy Osbourne would return in triumphant form with his third solo album Bark At The Moon, while his replacement in Sabbath, Ronnie James Dio, had bounced back from his own acrimonious split with Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler to launch his own solo band, Dio, with a brilliant debut album, Holy Diver.
Sabbath’s notoriously combative manager Don Arden, still smarting over his daughter Sharon’s decision to manage Ozzy, wasn’t a man who took kindly to his charges being pushed out of the spotlight, and having recruited former Deep Purple vocalist Ian Gillan to front a new Mk. III Sabbath line-up on their new Born Again album, Arden had a brainwave in regards to how the godfathers of metal could re-establish themselves as rock giants: they should perform live in front of giant rocks.
The concept, and its disastrous execution, is explained in excruciating detail in Geezer Butler’s entertaining, recently-released new memoir Into The Void.
“Presumably because we had an instrumental called Stonehenge on the album, Don wanted a Stonehenge stage set, with a massive sun rising up behind the stones as the show progressed,” Butler writes. “I thought it was an utterly ridiculous idea.”
The idea descended into farce from the moment that the designers of the new stage set looked at Sabbath’s tour manager’s plans for the production, and wrongly interpreted his measurements of the size of the rocks as pertaining to metres rather than feet. As a consequence, the stage props which were delivered to Sabbath were three times larger than they were supposed to be.
“When we rehearsed at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, the stones were set up on the floor and actually looked really expressive,” Butler recalls, noting that the idea of the ‘rising sun’ was abandoned due to the costs involved. “But when we did our first gig of the tour in Norway, and out the stones on the stage, they were almost touching the ceiling.
“That’s when Don had another brainwave: ‘We’ll have a midget crawling on top of them, dressed as the baby devil on the album cover’… At our gig in Canada, this little bloke, who was dressed in a red leotard with long yellow fingernails and horns stuck to his head, was crawling across the top of the tallest stone and fell off. That was actually supposed to happen, but someone had removed the mattress, and the poor fella injured himself quite badly. That was the end of the devil baby.”