Former BLACK SABBATH vocalist Tony Martin says that he is currently in the dark about the recently discussed reissues of the albums that he sang on for the band.
With Martin on vocals, BLACK SABBATH released six records, including 1987’s “The Eternal Idol” and 1989’s “Headless Cross”, among others which always seem to be kept in the dark when looking at the band’s massive catalog.
Martin recently discussed the possibility of the albums from his time in BLACK SABBATH being reissued in a talk with the guys over at The Metal Voice. He said (as transcribed by BLABBERMOUTH.NET): “We had a guy in BLACK SABBATH called Geoff Nicholls. He was the keyboard player. He died four years ago. And when we [were] at Geoff Nicholls’s funeral service, I bumped into Tony Iommi there, and he said, ‘I’ve got loads of stuff to play you. And we have to get together and see if we can write some new songs. And then maybe we can re-release the Tony Martin-era albums.’ And I thought, ‘Well, that’s cool. Okay. Whatever.’ Then the phone went dead for ages — months and months and months and months. So I called him back and he said, ‘Come over to the house and we’ll talk about it.’ So I said, ‘Okay.’ So I went to his house and he said, ‘We can’t do it.’ And I went, ‘What?’ He said, ‘We can’t do it.’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He said because there’s an agreement with the guys of SABBATH that they can only release something [new] under the SABBATH name if it’s the original SABBATH members. Nobody else can record anything [new] under the SABBATH name…. What he said was what we can do is reissue the albums. We can’t add anything to it. So what we’re expecting, if he ever gets around to it, is for the Tony Martin-era albums, apart from ‘Eternal Idol’, ’cause that’s owned by someone else, to be reissued. Remixed probably in the case of ‘Forbidden’, but I think it’ll just be as it was… [We can add] only stuff that’s already been recorded at the time.”
Martin goes on to say that he has plenty of recordings in his collection that would be ideal for inclusion on the reissues of the BLACK SABBATH albums he was featured on should that project move ahead.
“I’ve searched through… I’ve got hundreds of tapes — things from the writing sessions,” he said. “I’ve got the tapes when Eddie Van Halen was with us writing on ‘Cross Purposes’. I sent that over to Tony. That appeared on YouTube; I don’t know how that got out. But I’ve got all sorts of stuff like that. And I thought that was the kind of thing that they would reissue the albums with. But I have no idea. You probably know more than me.”
Check out the full interview at this location.
Martin’s new solo album, “Thorns”, will arrive on January 14 via Battlegod Productions and Dark Star Records.