THE CLASSIC ROCK INTERVIEW
He went from the suburbs of Birmingham to performing on the world’s biggest stages, helping invent heavy metal along the way. The Black Sabbath bassist/lyricist looks back on more than 50 years of defecating singers, setting drummers on fire, intra-band bust-ups and a lifelong struggle with depression.
His accent has hardly changed in more than 70 years. He may have made his home in the USA, in Utah, where he lives with Gloria, his American wife of 43 years, but nothing has taken the working-class Brummie out of Geezer Butler. His roots remain obviously preserved in his doleful speaking voice; the downbeat, sing-song cadences that make him sound as if in a continual state of surprise, every sentence ending like the punch line to a self-deprecating joke.
These days, Butler mournfully intones, he is not doing very much of anything. As he describes it, generally he wakes up each morning with three cups of tea – Yorkshire Gold, always. He has his two dogs to walk; he lost his eldest dog just the other day. The Butlers have three cats, too, all rescue animals. The man who shared a stage with notorious bat biter and chicken slayer Ozzy Osbourne is an inveterate animal lover and animal rights activist, a campaigner for PETA and the Humane Society Of The United States. Otherwise he passes his time reading books, mostly non-fiction history, and watching his beloved Aston Villa on TV. He turns 74 in July, and bemoans the fact that he’s starting to feel his age. “In just the last four weeks I’ve developed tinnitus in my ear,” he offers matter-of-factly. “Driving me bloody mad. And I’m deaf in the other ear too.”
If Butler could help it, he wouldn’t be interrupting his routine with doing an interview today, but needs must. He has a book to promote. His memoir, Into The Void, is, like its author, altogether no-nonsense and often laugh-out-loud funny. The greater part of it, of course, is taken up with his long and erratic time as bassist and lyricist with Black Sabbath. It’s a role he writes about as “like being an actor in a soap opera”.
It’s been six years now since Butler, Osbourne and Tony Iommi pulled down the final curtain on the Sabbath saga. And he insists that there will be no turning back from this end to their glorious and gloriously bonkers road.
“Rock legends? That’s all very silly,” he says. “If I thought of myself like that I’d start dyeing my hair again and doing me shopping in black leather.”
He was born Terence Michael Joseph Butler in Aston, Birmingham on July 17, 1949, the youngest of seven children, six boys and a girl. His father James, an engineer, and mother Mary Butler, a housewife, were devout Irish Catholics transplant
