(Credits: Far Out / Alamy)
Fri 2 January 2026 4:00, UK
How many in popular music can honestly look down on a genre and, with very real confidence, lay claim to having paved the way for all within it as much as Tony Iommi?
Iommi stands tall with a colossal presence in the heavy metal world. Soaking up a little of the occult, downtuning his strings, and conjuring a heftier blues attack than anyone else at the 1960s’ close, Black Sabbath scored the hippie dream’s nightmarish dash with evocative charge, owing plenty to Iommi’s dungeon riffs.
Giving Led Zeppelin a run for their money, Black Sabbath dropped a string of mythic LPs across 1970 to 1975, practically worshipped by every self-respecting metalhead for the last half century.
Iommi’s haunted fretwork and combative guitar can be felt across the sleeveless denimed mob retreating into the new wave of British heavy metal’s sanctuary away from punk, the hair metal gyrating on 1980s MTV, and the stirring grunge anthems wielded by the likes of Alice in Chains and Soundgarden. Wherever you look among the vast metal cosmos and its myriad satellites, Iommi’s fingerprints can be found.
During their pomp, Black Sabbath toured with some of the day’s biggest bands. On the road for the Sabotage Tour, Iommi and the band found everybody from Slade, Peter Frampton, Lynyrd Skynyrd, and Aerosmith eagerly queuing up to fill the coveted support slot. Yet, one new juggernaut of the metal world initially left Iommi severely wanting.
“Kiss, on the other hand, I don’t know what happened there, because we didn’t sort of really get on with them,” Iommi confessed on the Gibson YouTube channel, racking his brains to those early days with the greasepaint quartet. “And I remember seeing the sign outside: ‘Black Sabbath and Kiss.’ It was on this board, got those letters that you stick on, and we found the ‘P’ and took the ‘K’ off, and put ‘Piss’ on it.”
While the mountains of merchandise hadn’t quite exploded yet, Kiss were on the cusp of rock domination across 1975, their Alive! album imminent and the next year’s Destroyer, catapulting the New York glam outfit to superstardom. Before long, Kiss were plastered on lunchboxes, bedsheets, and an NBC television film, all adding to the Kiss corporation and raking in as much as a reported billion in profits to this day.
“We used to see them at the airport, and we never knew who they were because they’d have all that makeup on, we couldn’t tell if that was the crew or the band,” Iommi furthered. “You’re sort of looking, ‘Is that the band?’ For a while, it was a bit funny, but as time went on, it got well, got okay.”
Perhaps too mercenary and aloof for Iommi’s taste? There are worlds of difference between Black Sabbath and Kiss’ camps, the former tapping into a scarred reality while the demon-painted, tongue-flicking latter offers a comic escapism. While Kiss would sell a lot more records, Black Sabbath boast a body of work whose low points tower over Kiss at their cartoonishly best.
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