Being in Black Sabbath felt like being an actor in a soap opera,” sighs the band’s bassist and chief lyricist Terence ‘Geezer’ Butler. So it proves.
His tale starts with an upbringing so hardscrabble that this seventh child of a seventh child, born on the seventeenth day of the seventh month at seven minutes to midnight (or so he claims) would sleep in his childhood bedroom with an ovenwarmed brick wrapped inside a towel for winter warmth, and ends with him walking his dogs, reading Ian Rankin, listening to Billie Holiday and Royal Blood and drinking Yorkshire Tea in his Utah home, when he’s not taking cruises.
What really concerns us, though, is the time in between, when having given up accountancy, the grammar school kid became a mainstay of the ultimate heavy metal band. Rather like the bassist himself, is unflashy, but it’s competently written with the assistance of Ben Dirs, and only at the end when Butler grudgingly admits “some of my original manuscript was deemed unsuitable for modern readers – times
