Tony Iommi Says He Still Wants to Collaborate With Queen’s Brian May
Black Sabbath icon Tony Iommi recently reaffirmed his openness to a musical collaboration with Brian May, the Queen rocker who just so happens to be his good friend.
What would a project sound like between the two influential guitarists? That's anyone's guess, but Iommi has discussed the prospect numerous times in the past.
He and May first hatched the plan when the Queen guitarist visited Iommi shortly after Iommi's 2012 lymphoma diagnosis. The Sabbath shredder is known to keep a stockpile of guitar riffs on hand, and after playing some of them for May, an idea was formed. "We may well find some way of working together on them," Iommi later told The Birmingham Mail in 2013.
But since the project has yet to come to fruition, the Black Sabbath co-founder was asked about it in part of a new interview that emerged on Thursday (Dec. 9).
"We've talked about it for years, we really have," Iommi now tells Classic Rock, "and the pandemic smacked everything up. Brian came here to my house just before."
He continues, "It was a lovely day; we sat outside in the courtyard and played riffs. I played him some of the stuff I'd got, and he said, 'Oh, great, you've gotta do something with this.' And we've talked about it on and off. It would be nice, one day, to do that."
May is "really busy now doing all sorts of things," Iommi adds, "and it's great that he's kept active. You can never say what's gonna happen. It would be nice. I'm open for a lot of things now, really."
One of those things is a Tony Iommi fragrance, which accompanied Iommi's first rock song in eight years.
Last month, May apologized for remarks he made about gender that he said were misrepresented in print.