Iron Man: My Journey Through Heaven & Hell with Black Sabbath - Tony Iommi, T.J. Lammers (2011)

Chapter 60. Lovely Lita

Lita Ford opened for us on the Born Again tour. We got together after a show to have a chat, and we hit it off. It developed into a relationship and when I lived in Bel Air, in the house with the people in the loft, she came to visit me there. After I moved out of there and got a penthouse at Crescent Heights and Sunset in LA, she moved in with me. I was still married to Melinda at the time. We had split up, but it took me a long time to get a divorce, so I suppose technically I was committing adultery. Lita and I even got engaged, but we couldn’t do any more than that until I got divorced.

Lita helped us look for a new singer. She knew a couple of people we could try, but after Bill and Geezer left I was in need of a whole new band. It was her idea to let me use the drummer and the bass player of her band, Eric Singer and Gordon Copley. Eric wanted to play in my band more than he did in Lita’s, so he said to me: ‘If you want a drummer, I would be interested.’

He ended up working with me for quite a while. Lita then looked at it as, oh, he’s nicked my drummer. She got the hump about it so bad, that our break-up came mainly from that.

At the time I was doing a lot of drugs again, which was also hard for her. Me and Geoff Nicholls would be at the penthouse a lot, trying to write something and doing coke at the same time. Every time Lita came home, Geoff would be there. It looked like I was more involved with him than I was with her.

Me and Geoff were in the penthouse one day and I put the chains on the door and something up against it, because you get paranoid when you do a lot of coke. We were working on a song when we heard this loud bang. It was Lita. She couldn’t open the door and pushed it so hard that the whole rim of the door came off, with the chains and everything. And then she got pissed off, because we were at it again.

It was a shame, really, because I messed up the relationship by being constantly out of it. She was a nice girl and we got on well. It just started coming apart, certainly when the Eric thing happened. We were together for about two years. Then we went our separate ways. Lita was later managed by Sharon Arden. She phoned me and said: ‘I’m looking for a manager. What about Sharon?’

I said: ‘I don’t know. It’s up to you.’

Sharon got Lita to do a song with Ozzy that went to No. 1, so she did all right for her. For a while. Until she dropped her.