Geezer Butler has been talking about the time the rest of Black Sabbath sacked him - and then promptly forgot all about it.
The bassist was speaking with LifeMinute TV about his new-ish memoir Into The Void, when he alighted on the state of the band in the late 70s.
“Everybody was totally out of their brains all the time," he admitted. "We’d sold millions and millions of albums and sold out thousands of gigs around the world. We still hardly had any money to show for it, and we'd sort of realised that we were being ripped off by the management.”
Things came to a head in 1977. “I think people just wanted a scapegoat for the whole thing - it just happened to be me at the time. Bill Ward came to the house and said, ‘Oh, by the way, you’re fired.’ ‘Oh, thanks very much. Why?’ ‘You don’t seem into it any more.’
“I was actually relieved because we were under so much pressure at the time. [It was] probably the best two weeks that I’d had for years! I could just relax and not think about the business, or getting albums together, or anything like that.”
But the rest of the band were in such a state at the time that they forgot that they had sacked the bassist. “About two or three weeks later, Bill calls me up and says, ‘Where are you?’ I said, ‘What do you mean?’ He said, ‘We’re here, rehearsing!’" he explained. “I said, ‘I thought I was fired… You told me I was fired from the band!’ He said, ‘Oh, yeah - forgot about that.’ So I went down to rehearsal, nobody said anything about it, [and we] just carried on as normal.”
Butler did leave the band briefly a couple of years later, but was back on board for the post-Ozzy album, 1980’s Heaven And Hell. He left for a few years in the 1980s and again in the mid '90s, but has been there consistently since 1997.
The bassist also talked about the possibility of the four core members performing one more time. Although he doubted whether a full reunion would ever happen now, he said: “Maybe a one off show. Ozzy was talking about when he does his farewell concert, which he still wants to do... he suggested for the four of us to get up on stage and maybe do three or four songs together and then that would be it. But definitely no more tours.”
