Black Sabbath are the fathers of metal. Four working-class lads from Birmingham who changed the face of music, found themselves thrust into the spotlight as their groundbreaking heavy sound took fans by the throat and shook the crap out of them. Suddenly a hugely successful band, as you can imagine from a group of young men in their 20s, excess and lunacy would follow them everywhere. 

There are a million tales that could be told about Black Sabbath’s debauchery, but two that often get overlooked are Toni Iommi’s seemingly  continuing quest to kill off drummer Bill Ward, even if it was usually accidental in nature.  

The first time this happened – as Tony Iommi revealed in an interview with The Guardian Newspaper – was when the band had this seemingly brilliant idea to paint Bill Ward head to toe in gold paint. If you’ve ever seen Goldfinger, you can probably guess how this worked out.  According to Tony Iommi;

“We were staying at John DuPont’s house in Los Angeles, the bloke who owned DuPont paint products. We found all this paint in the garage and were all pissed, so thought it would be fun to paint Bill gold from head to toe. He started having convulsions. The  ambulance people gave us a right bollocking: ‘You idiots! You could have killed him.’ They gave him adrenalin and we had to use a paint stripper to get it off. He looked like a beetroot by the end.”  

You would’ve thought that such a close call – and all-around telling off from the local ambulance crew – would’ve put a crimp in any other plans that Toni Iommi and the other members of Black Sabbath had to prank their erstwhile drummer. You would, of course, be wrong.  

Not to let something like near death by paint asphyxiation hold him back, Tony Iommi took to setting Bill Ward on fire with rubbing alcohol whenever the opportunity arose. And it seemed to arise more often than you’d think.

During the same interview with the Guardian, Iommi recounted;  

“It was our party piece, which always worked until the last time we did it. We had this new producer, Martin Birch, who’d heard all these stories about satanism and was a bit nervous. I made a wooden doll and wrapped it in a black cloth and the other guys wound him up that it was my  voodoo doll of him. Anyway, Bill says – in front of Martin – ‘Are you going to set fire to me then, Tony?’ I tipped rubbing alcohol over him. Normally it just burned off but this time it soaked into his clothes, so when I lit it he went up like a bomb. He was rolling on the floor, shouting and screaming. I thought it was part of the joke, so poured more stuff on him. Martin couldn’t believe it. We had to get an ambulance for Bill. He’d got third-degree burns. I felt bloody awful. We still play jokes on each other. Not quite as severe as that. I learned my lesson.”

Well, it’s good to see that nearly burning his bandmate alive, was all it took to slow Toni Iommi down…