Tony Iommi has spent his entire professional life using two prosthetic fingertips – which he calls his “thimbles.” The Black Sabbath guitarist was working in a sheet metal factory in his teens when a machine severed the middle and ring fingers of his right, fretting hand.
All evidence suggests the thimble haven’t held him back in the six decades since. “They’re all right,” he tells Guitar World. “I have to keep the fingertips in shape when I’m on tour. I change the leather parts every couple of weeks, and it’s a bit of a hassle, but I’ve got used to it.
“I put tape on those fingers, and then I put a bit of glue on the tape and push the thimble until it holds on. They used to fall off, and it was a bloody pain, trying to find them. ‘Where is it? It’s on the floor somewhere!’”
Iommi confirms he’d struggle to get through a show if anything went wrong with the prosthetics. “I couldn’t get through the gig, because I couldn’t touch the strings,” he says. “The bone is right under the skin. One time, years ago, when it did come off, I fretted a string and it sliced right through my finger. There was blood all over the place!
He adds: “But I can play with the two other fingers — I learned to use my little finger in the early days because I had to.”
Last month Iommi told Classic Rock he was grateful to the U.K.’s National Health Service for continuing to provide prosthetics since 1966. “But the thing is, they send me a whole rubber arm,” he explained. “I’ve asked them, ‘Why not just send a hand?’ But apparently they can’t do that.
“And they sometimes send me five arms at a time. So I chop the fingers off and throw the arms in the bin. The dustmen must be thinking, ‘What the bloody hell’s going on here? Has he bumped someone off?’”
Iommi releases his new solo album, From the Dark, on October 23.
