Black Sabbath producer Ernie C wanted to make them sound like Nirvana but it didn’t work.
“Yeah, it’s pretty good actually. [Remix] I like it. I like it,” the guitarist told the Metal Voice when talking about producing Black Sabbath’s ‘Forbidden.’ “BTW I’m on that [cover] my picture is coming out of the grave there with the hat. I’m right there with a hat turned backwards. So the band [Black Sabbath] didn’t bring me in [to produce] Miles Copeland brought me in to do the record.”
He continued his words, “So I went over there when I was between 20- 30 years old or something. I was like I’m going to bring Black Sabbath’s sound up to date, they’re gonna sound like Nirvana. Cozy Powell was the drummer and he came in with four drum sets and he played on each one for an hour.”
“So he did this whole thing and I mixed the drums the way it was going to sound and he came in and he had a stopwatch. He was timing himself with a stopwatch. He said like Ernie I’m off right there. I’m like really?” the musician shared.
Ernie C further recalled that period, “That’s some interesting stuff I had never seen before, I’m from South Central so we didn’t have stopwatches [Laughs]. So anyway we go through the whole thing and he listens to his drums and he hands me a tape and says. [You know I had his drums dried up a little bit and it wasn’t the big massive sound that he had.]”
“He [Cozy] says tomorrow make my drum sound like this, like okay I gotta figure this out now [laughs]. They wanted to change but they didn’t want to change, they wanted to stay far from the course. So I wanted to change it a little more.”
Tony Iommi told the Sabbath fanzine Southern Cross that he was ‘not happy’ with ‘Forbidden.’ He explained, “We brought in Ernie C to do production, which was a bit difficult really, because I had to leave him to it… One of the problems was we weren’t all there at the same time when we were writing it. Cozy and Neil were still contracted to do other stuff, so it ended up with just Tony Martin, Geoff Nicholls, and myself just jamming around and putting ideas down. It all came together very quickly and we didn’t have time to reflect: make sure it was the right songs and the right way of doing it.”
Iommi worked on a ‘Forbidden’ remix with Mike Exeter and finished it in 2020. It was released in a box set of the Tony Martin albums in May 2024.