GLENN HUGHES - Pipes Up! Page 2
by Martin Popoff

But while you wait, you can dig into two other sides of the building Hughes discography. First, there's Iommi With Glenn Hughes - The 1996 DEP Sessions, an actually very polished collection of demos (changes have been made) of eight very strong songs in a number of still rocking directions.

"Tony and I got together in '96, to start writing, for something," says Glenn, of the previously widely bootlegged tapes. "He still had Sabbath, obviously without Ozzy. I mean, Tony Martin had left or whatever. And I think at some point, Tony and I were going to do something, probably not under the name Black Sabbath, although he probably wanted to do something like that. But I think, if we were going to do a Black Sabbath record, we probably would have done different material. But Tony and I weren't really looking for a follow-up to Seventh Star. We were just writing songs. And we probably would have written 30 more songs. When we get together we write a lot of stuff. So after the eighth song was written, in his home studio, that's probably when I went back to start work on my next record in America, and about six months later, the reunion with Ozzy happened. Those eight songs were written without a focus. I mean, they're all different, as you've heard. It's lighter, it's heavier, it's more melodic, it's everything, just different. Tony has many sides to him, obviously. But he's Tony Iommi; he's the riffmaster, the heavy riff guy, but also a very, very talented songwriter in many ways that not many people know. I think he wanted to release this again properly just for a different approach, really. It's not where people can say, well, it's so far removed from Tony Iommi, they won't understand it. It's still him. But we like the direction. Remember, it's eight years ago."

Removed were the drum tracks of Dave Holland. Currently in jail for sexual offences, Dave was in Judas Priest, previously in Trapeze with Glenn. Jimmy Copley pounds the skins, and just that updating, has rendered this CD way beyond demo quality to what is actually quite a plush sounding album.

GLENN HUGHES - Pipes Up! Page 3