Geezer Butler recalls in his new memoir “Into The Void” how Black Sabbath had a stage set inspired by Stonehenge.
He writes, “Presumably because we had an instrumental called ‘Stonehenge’ on the [‘Born Again’] album, [manager] Don [Arden] wanted a Stonehenge stage set, with a massive sun rising up behind the stones as the show progressed. I thought it was an utterly ridiculous idea.”
The ridiculous idea went to new heights when the set’s builders built the stones too big by misinterpreting the measurements as meters instead of feet.
“When we rehearsed at the National Exhibition Centre in Birmingham, the stones were set up on the floor and actually looked really expressive,” Butler recalls, noting that the idea of the ‘rising sun’ was abandoned due to the costs involved. “But when we did our first gig of the tour in Norway, and out the stones on the stage, they were almost touching the ceiling.”
Of course, the 1984 cult classic ‘This is Spinal Tap’ had a similar Stonehenge bit in the film. However, the film’s actors said those scenes weren’t based on Sabbath’s mistake, which Butler wrote he found “difficult to believe.”
