Any band that manages to stick together for several decades is bound to experience its share of ups and downs. That principle certainly held true for Black Sabbath, a group whose massive successes were occasionally balanced by a series of embarrassing and even outlandish failures — and few of those failures were more unfortunately memorable than the numerous debacles surrounding the tour for their 1983 Born Again album.
Of course, as Sabbath fans have long been well aware, the band’s Born Again era was fraught with problems from the start. In need of a new lead singer after Ronnie James Dio‘s departure, they turned to former Deep Purple frontman Ian Gillan, who was ready to start rocking again after a brief professional hiatus to rest his voice. Sabbath manager Don Arden made the connection, which resulted in a night of heavy drinking with guitarist Tony Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler; as Gillan later admitted, the trio indulged so enthusiastically that he didn’t even remember agreeing to join the project.
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Initial plans to call themselves something other than Black Sabbath were eventually scuttled by the label, which put additional weight on Born Again when it arrived in stores — under which the album promptly collapsed, the victim of criticisms both unfair (these songs may not really sound like Sabbath, but they aren’t all bad) and perfectly valid (that cover artwork is truly atrocious). While they had to have been hoping for a more positive reception, the members of Sabbath were no strangers to negative press. When they hit the road, however, things really started to go awry.
Electric Light Sabbath
Drummer Bill Ward arrived for the Born Again sessions after a stint in rehab to deal with his alcoholism, but by the time his parts had been completed, it was clear he wasn’t sticking with his treatment, and he left the lineup to focus on his health. With tour dates looming, the band needed to find a replacement fairly quickly, so Iommi turned to his friend, Electric Light Orchestra drummer Bev Bevan. Calling his introduction to the lineup “a crash course in rock drumming,” Bevan insisted he wasn’t leaving ELO; he just didn’t think the band would ever tour again, and with years between new albums at that point, he was eager for opportunities to keep his chops up. “I really enjoy playing Sabbath,” he commented in the midst of the tour. “I think it’s particularly important for a drummer to keep playing. Otherwise your hands go soft.”
Ultimately, everything worked out for Bevan pretty well on that front; when the Gillan-fronted Sabbath lineup imploded at the end of the Born Again tour, it left an ELO-sized opening in his schedule just as frontman Jeff Lynne reconvened the band for the sessions that produced 1986’s Balance of Power LP.
Highway to Helsinki
The tour’s third stop brought Sabbath to Finland, where, according to Butler, they touched down on the amusingly appropriate HEL 666. He was less amused when they got to their hotel and found the bar shutting down at 10pm because, as he alleged in his Into the Void memoir, the bartender didn’t think it was worth it to stay open with only the members of Black Sabbath in the room. Annoyed, Butler decamped to Gillan’s room, where he and the singer opened a gallon of whiskey that Gillan had purchased at the airport; after Gillan passed out, Butler took the rest of the bottle back to his room, where he continued sipping and stewing.
Looking out his window, Butler noticed his room was above the bar, at which point he decided to stuff that gallon bottle with wads of toilet paper, light it on fire, and hurl his would-be Molotov cocktail at a car parked outside the bar’s entrance. According to what had to have been some very hazy memories, it took Butler roughly two dozen matches to get it to light, and even then, throwing it at the car didn’t give him the explosion he was looking for. Irritated that he’d only managed to shatter the car’s windshield, he finally shuffled off to bed — and got the surprise of his life when he was shaken awake by a group of irate police officers.
“When I opened my eyes, I saw six policemen surrounding my bed, pointing machine guns at me. I asked them what had happened and one of them replied, ‘You’re under arrest for terrorism!’ I started telling them it had nothing to do with me, and he pointed at the floor, which was covered in spent matches. ‘Oh,’ I said. And with that, they snapped some handcuffs on me, bundled me into the back of a van and off to the police station I went.”
After some effort, Butler was able to convince his captors that he was a member of Black Sabbath and the whole thing was a misunderstanding — at least as far as allegations of terrorism were concerned — but then he nearly ruined the whole thing by making a pass at a female officer. “Just in the nick of time, Don and the tour manager appeared, apologized to the cops and bailed me out,” Butler wrote in Into the Void. “Don went nuts and threatened to throw me out of the band, but I lived to be banged up again.”
Chaos in Barcelona
In fact, it took Butler less than a month to be banged up again — and this time, the circumstances were far more severe. The show promoter invited the band to his club for a photo shoot, which went so well that they returned later that night, at which point things started to go… not so well. There are differing accounts of what actually sent the evening off the rails, but everyone agrees the instigator was Gillan, who alienated the waitstaff by either pouring peanuts down the back of a waiter’s pants or actually lighting them on fire.
At this point, believe it or not, Sabbath still could have left without incident. But according to Butler, Gillan was stopped on the way out by a waiter, who noticed he still had a glass in his hand and asked him to either finish his drink or simply leave it behind. Gillan, who was presumably pretty impaired at this point, didn’t take kindly to the waiter’s request, which led to road manager Paul Clark socking one of the bouncers. At this point, all bets were off.
“While bouncers, waiters and kitchen staff were coming at us with chains and metal bars, Gillan was nowhere to be seen,” wrote Butler. “We later discovered he’d run away at the first sign of the trouble he’d started. Tony enjoyed a fight, but this was a bit much even for him. The last I saw of him that night, he was jumping into a cab, along with Bev Bevan and Geoff Nicholls. That left just me and Paul to face the music.”
Iommi remembers things differently. In his Iron Man memoir, he recalled “fighting for our lives” against a swarm of assailants who were wielding “knives and martial arts nunchucks and everything.” According to Iommi, it was Gillan who vanished before things got violent; although he said the singer later claimed he’d fallen into a ditch, Iommi suspected he really just ran for safety.
One thing everyone agrees on is that Butler — who later quipped he’d “seen far too many films” — injured himself by shattering some glass. Intending to use it as a weapon, he instead sliced his finger up so badly that by the time he and Clark escaped, he was “covered in blood.” Unsurprisingly, this wasn’t enough to engender any sympathy from the police, who waited until Butler had been stitched up before carting him off to jail, where Clark was already waiting.
According to Butler, the arresting officer then hit Clark in the nose with his baton — and when they were finally released the following morning, they learned that the man Clark initially punched was not only in the hospital, but apparently had connections with a local gang, members of which were waiting for Butler and Clark outside the station. They managed to escape and find a different hotel, but Arden wasn’t taking any chances; that night and for the rest of the tour, he hired a passel of bodyguards to protect the group.
“Tony, who was wise to these types of incidents, advised me to throw the vase next time, rather than smash the bloody thing,” recalled Butler. “As for Don, he was probably wishing he’d never heard of Black Sabbath.”
A Foggy Memory
If Don Arden wished he’d never heard of Black Sabbath, Ian Gillan openly admitted he hadn’t heard Sabbath — at least not for over a decade leading up to joining the band. This caused some problems when it came time to tour, because while Gillan had done a fine job of penning the lyrics for Born Again, he hadn’t had an opportunity to learn the words to the songs that would make up a significant chunk of the set list.
As Iommi wrote in Iron Man, Gillan tried compensating for this by putting together a binder full of lyrics that he hid behind his vocal monitors. Unfortunately, all the dry ice-induced fog on the stage made it impossible for him to read the words, forcing him to scramble by stooping and frantically trying to blow it away. Needless to say, it wasn’t a perfect solution.
“Ian was standing there with his head down, hair in front of his face, huffing and puffing, furiously trying to blow the dry ice away from his lyric sheets. I went: ‘You can’t have all those lyrics lying around, it looks a bit obvious,'” Iommi recalled. “He said: ‘I’ve nearly got them. I’ll have them soon!’ But he never did, he just couldn’t remember them.”
Falling Off the Edge of the Stage
Gillan’s inability to absorb the lyrics to Sabbath’s catalog wasn’t his only issue. Iommi also recalled his former frontman being something less than physically coordinated, although he was at least able to think fast when his body betrayed him.
“Ian wasn’t very sure-footed either. He once fell over my pedal board,” Iommi wrote in Iron Man. “He was waving at the people, stepped back and, bang!, he went arse over head big time. He jumped up and tried to make believe it was part of the show.”
Smoke on the Sabbath, But No Evil Women Allowed
Ian Gillan’s place in the rock ‘n’ roll firmament has long since been established, but he wouldn’t be anyone’s first pick to compete in an Ozzy impersonation contest. Given that, it’s more than understandable that he’d be a bit skittish about covering some of the band’s greatest hits — and that Iommi would be open to improving the situation by adding the Deep Purple classic “Smoke on the Water” to the set list. Unfortunately, a lot of other people failed to see the wisdom of this decision.
“I suggested we play ‘Smoke on the Water,’ because Ian was known for it and it seemed like a bum deal for him not to do any of his stuff while he was doing all of ours,” Iommi explained. “I don’t know whether we played it properly, but the audience loved it. The critics moaned; it was something out of the bag and they didn’t want to know then.”
According to keyboardist Geoff Nicholls, Iommi also considered extending a similar courtesy to Bevan by incorporating the ELO song “Evil Woman” into the set list. That idea didn’t get far, however; Nicholls is quoted in Mick Wall’s Black Sabbath: Symptom of the Universe as saying that whenever the band started to rehearse the number, the opening chord progression “would make us all fall about laughing.”
Hear Black Sabbath Perform ‘Smoke on the Water’
Born AgAAAAAAAAin
Gillan wasn’t the only Sabbath member to suffer from embarrassing onstage mishaps. Butler copped to a particularly painful one in Into the Void, admitting that during one show, he strapped on his eight-string bass for a performance of “Born Again,” and realized to his quickly dawning horror that his bass tech — who was also his nephew — had made a horrible mistake.
“It immediately became clear that [he] had tuned all the strings to A. There I was, making a terrible racket on this eight-string bass, and I wanted the ground to swallow me up,” wrote Butler. “Then, as I was hastily changing over to my four-string bass, the backdrop went up in flames. It was the ultimate joke gig, and the crowd must have thought we’d lost our marbles.”
Taking the Piss
We’ve already established that clubs, hotels, and stages weren’t safe from the comedy of errors that plagued the Born Again tour, but airplanes fell prey as well. Writing about their doomed trek in Into the Void, Butler recalled a flight that started with the members of Sabbath already well fortified with booze… and ended with them being briefly, clumsily pursued by customs agents.
The problems started on the way to the airport, when the band decided to stop for a few rounds of Guinness. By the time they boarded the plane, they were in urgent need of a bathroom; unfortunately, it didn’t have one, so they resorted to extreme measures.
“Out came the sick bags, into which we relieved ourselves,” wrote Butler. “We then put all the bags into one large bag and left it in the aisle. As we were leaving the plane, a flight attendant said, ‘Hey, aren’t you forgetting something?’ So I had to take the large bag of piss with me.”
Trying to ditch the bag at the earliest available opportunity, Butler tried “declaring” it at the customs desk by leaving it there. Naturally, the customs agents didn’t want it either.
“As we were scurrying off, I could hear the officer yelling for us to come back. When a policeman tried to stop Tony, he knocked his helmet off. And when it hit the floor, the badge came off,” Butler recalled. “Luckily, the copper was more interested in retrieving his badge than trying to stop us, so we were able to escape into our waiting limos.”
Stonehenge
You can’t talk about the Born Again tour without getting into the most famous catastrophe of all — namely, the stage set, which was supposed to be a scaled-down replica of Stonehenge, but ended up being 45 feet high due to a misunderstanding.
“Geezer jotted down what it should look like and gave it to the designers. Two or three months later we saw it. We rehearsed for the tour at the Birmingham NEC and we said: ‘Oh great, the stage set is going to come today!’ It came in and we couldn’t believe it. It was as big as the real Stonehenge,” Iommi recalled in Iron Man. “They had taken Geezer’s measurements the wrong way and thought it was meant to be life-size. I said: ‘How the bloody hell did that happen?’ ‘Well, I put down the height in centimeters, but they must have thought it was in inches.’”
Things went from bad to worse after the tour opener. Seeking another theatrical twist, Arden hired a person of small stature to dress up like the demonic baby on the Born Again album cover. The idea, according to Butler, was for the actor to crawl around on top of the stones before falling off, crying, and going silent. In order to avoid actual injury, stagehands put mattresses in the spot where he was supposed to fall, but during one fateful gig in Canada, the mattresses weren’t there. “That,” wrote Butler, “was the end of the devil baby.”
The Stonehenge set was so big that it was not only difficult to ship and store, but it often couldn’t even fit inside the venues the band had booked. Numerous attempts to give it away or sell it failed, leaving Sabbath with a difficult decision as dates dwindled on the calendar. (You can get a good look at the stage here.)
“At the end of the tour we tried to give it all away to the people who had bought London Bridge and reassembled it in Arizona, but they didn’t want it,” Iommi recalled in Iron Man. “We couldn’t take it back to England, so the crew dumped it off at the docks somewhere and left it. Just ridiculous. We abandoned Stonehenge right there in America.”
They may have left Stonehenge, but Stonehenge has never left them — thanks in large part to This Is Spın̈al Tap, the Rob Reiner-directed mockumentary that has reduced generations of rock fans to hysterics with its (slightly) over-the-top depiction of music industry buffoonery and excess. During one particularly memorable portion, the members of Spın̈al Tap are upset to discover that the Stonehenge stage set they’ve commissioned has been built in miniature — a case of art imitating life so closely that it’s long been assumed the Tap creative team stole the idea from Sabbath’s own tour woes.
The problem with this, as Reiner pointed out in 2025, is that Sabbath toured with their Stonehenge set in 1983 and 1984, and This Is Spın̈al Tap was released in March of ’84, just a couple of days before the Born Again tour wrapped in Springfield, Massachusetts. “What morons,” he scoffed. “What did they think? They [thought] that we shot the film, we edited it, [and] we got it into the theaters in two weeks? I mean, it is ludicrous. But to me, that was the great, perfect heavy metal moment: that they were so dumb that they thought that we stole it from them.”
Reiner’s observation makes perfect sense, and it’s also nothing new; when he wrote Into the Void, Butler acknowledged that the Tap crew had long denied any actual connection. Still, he remained unconvinced. “I find that difficult to believe,” he wrote. “Not only did they have that Stonehenge section, but they also had combustible drummers, and we’d been setting fire to Bill for years.”
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Gallery Credit: Eduardo Rivadavia
