The band knows nothing about it, but it’s clear that Iommi was planning the prank for a while, because his accomplice moves perfectly. He is one of the stage technicians, to whom Iommi sticks his jacket, hangs a guitar around his neck and sends him on stage, starting to play from the darkness of the back of the stage so that he mimes the song under the spotlights.
Complete with wig and moustache, at first glance the two look alike and the audience totally falls for it. Even Martin – who knew nothing about the exchange and had just loudly announced “Mr. Tony Iommi!” -he is perplexed when he notices that something is decidedly out of place: that Tony Iommi is right-handed, while Iommi is already an icon with his left-handed attitude. Seeing him with the guitar “backwards” short circuits the crowd and the singer.
A little scene from other times, a glimpse of a life on the road that saw band and entourage as part of a single large group, shoulder to shoulder to the point of remembering each other’s exploits decades later.
It seems that the two Tonys used to play pranks on and off the stage, and the one captured in the video extract is just one of the many that the couple recalls in the interview included with the “Anno Domini 1989-1995” boxset, a celebratory work of the era Tony Martin with Black Sabbath.
