Fact #117485

Tony Iommi : When we were on a European tour, we ended up playing in this one place in Zurich, the Hirschen club. We were there for what seemed like an eternity. In reality it was just a few weeks. The first night we arrived there, the place was packed, and it was fantastic. The band that was playing, it was their last night and they had champagne. We thought, ‘This is great!’ Little did we know that they couldn’t wait to get out of there. When we played the next night the place was as dead as a doornail. We were playing to hardly anybody. Our audience was a couple of hookers and some lunatic who used to come in do handstands in front of the stage and all his money would fall out of his pockets. But we carried on, and we played for ourselves, and it gave us the opportunity to jam and write, because we had so long to play. Every night we had to play seven forty-five minute spots. We hadn’t got enough songs, so we used to make up stuff. Which was great, really. That’s where War Pigs came from and some of the other tracks – from jamming.