Metal
Becky Baldwin has explained on The Chronicles Of Podcast how she ended up playing bass on “From The Dark”, the Tony Iommi album out on 23 October. It started with an email. “I got an e-mail first on just some random Wednesday or something. And I was just sat on my sofa just, like, ‘Oh, today sucks,’” she says. “An e-mail came through saying — I think ‘Tony Iommi’ was the subject. And it said, ‘Yeah, I’m Tony Iommi’s manager. And would you be interested in coming to the studio and listening to some stuff and seeing if you might like to work together with us?’ And I’m, like, ‘What?’ And I’m, like, ‘This is fake. Surely this is fake.’”
The man who put her in front of Iommi was producer Mike Exeter. “He follows musicians that he comes across, just to see what they’re doing in their career, and, yeah, just to see if it might be of use to him in his album production and stuff,” Baldwin explains. “He’d been following me for a few years. And so when Tony was looking for someone, and I’d been posting all my classic metal bass covers, including some Black Sabbath, he had something perfect to be, like, ‘Oh, I know a bass player who’s pretty local.’ So he showed Tony that, and Tony was, like, ‘Yeah, okay. Let’s bring her down for a jam.’” “Children of the Sea” is from “Heaven and Hell” (1980), the first Black Sabbath album with Ronnie James Dio.
The invitation was for one song. “They wanted to hear how I approach writing a bass line, how I am under the stress of the red-light recording button being on,” she says. “And I guess it was all right because they asked me to do the rest of the album.” Iommi, she explains, had started out writing with an album of collaborations in mind, like “Iommi” (2000), and ended up wanting one singer and one drummer across the whole thing.
She started the videos for a specific reason. “I wanted to show people in the industry that I can actually play… and please hire me,” she explains. “So, actually, it worked. It took quite a few years to work.”
“From The Dark” is out on 23 October via BMG, with Jørn Lande on vocals and Karl Brazil on drums. Baldwin is thirty-five and plays bass in Mercyful Fate.
Text by Roger Estivill