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Tony Iommi – Iron Man

Things go horribly south up north

After The Rest [his group] fell apart I got this offer to join a band called Mythology. They were from Carlisle, then a town of maybe 70,000 people on the border with Scotland, about a three-hour drive from Birmingham.

I went up there and Chris Smith came as well, as Mythology also needed a singer. The band had been reduced to Neil Marshall, the bass player and band leader, and a drummer who soon left, so I thought, well, I know a drummer!

Enter Bill Ward. Then most of The Rest moved to Carlisle and became Mythology. It was a logical step for us. In Birmingham there was a limit to what we could do, but Mythology was the biggest band up there, so there were gigs to be played.

I'd never been out of bloody Birmingham before, where I was still living with my parents. To move out and live up in Carlisle with the rest of the band was a big step. I didn’t know anybody, so having Chris there, and Bill a little later on, was great.  We lived in Compton House, a big place that was divided up into flats.  We had a lounge and a little kitchen on the top floor, and a bedroom underneath that we all shared.

The landlady and her daughter also lived in the house, but they weren’t the only ones there. One day we were about to order fish and chips and we counted out how many portions we'd need: 'You want chips, you want chips, you want chips . . .'

We counted one more than we actually needed, because there was a young boy there who we took into account. I said to Bill:

'Hang on, did you see that?'

'Yeah, a boy.'

Blimey, that was weird. It was really puzzling who this lad was.

I said to our landlady: 'It sounds mad, but we think we saw a young boy upstairs.'

She said: 'Did he look about seven or eight years old?'

'Yeah.'

'Oh, he died in the house many years ago.'

She was completely aware of it. He’d had a bad death right there. But he wasn’t the only one.  We saw this young girl there as well. Apparently she had drowned in the bath . . .It didn’t frighten us. If it had been ghosts jumping at us, screaming, we'd have probably shat ourselves, but they were just young kids.