Devilishly Good

It may sound slightly odd – Black Sabbath guitarist writes choral work for Birmingham Cathedral – but it should come as no great surprise that Tony Iommi has done just that.

There has always been a fine line between the devil's music and religious music – and sometimes no line at all.

Hank Williams, Johnny Cash, Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, Bob Dylan, Van Morrison... need one say much more?

Great musicians ploughing the fields of blues, country, soul, funk, rock and even heavy metal have all been inspired by the spiritual – if not the outright religious.

In fact, the "devil's players" come well equipped (with passion and feeling and a few "sins" to confess) to get religion. Yet conventionally religious types, on the other hand, don't usually have what it takes to rock...

Between Rock And A Small Place

Talking of Bob Dylan… and there are often not many more interesting things to do… I've been reading 'Small Town Talk' the irresistible account by Barney Hoskins of Woodstock (the town, not the festival) in the era of Dylan and The Band.

The book has, inevitably, a lot of drugs and a reasonable amount of sex… but not so much rock 'n' roll. Hoskins emphasises the point that Dylan, The Band, The Basement Tapes and the music that flowed on from them had little to do with the loud excesses of rock and the prevailing spirit of the time.

They were hip, not hippie, and they were artists, not rock stars. The same applied to Van Morrison, Jimi Hendrix and John Martyn, who also had their Woodstock moments and inspirations.

Every one of these great creative artists gets a flaws-and-all portrait from Hoskins, as does the awesome/awful svengali Albert Grossman, and also the town of Woodstock itself – which went the way of all Edens and ended up as a tourist attraction.