Black Sabbath - Live in 1986 (feat. Ray Gillen !)

Recorded on June 2nd 1986 at Hammersmith Odeon (London), this set features the Late Ray Gillen on vocals who had been hastily recruited by Tony iommi in the middle of the «Seventh Star» tour in order to replace Glenn Hugues (lead singer on the album), whose then addictions were becoming a major problem, even for a coke-plagued Iommi. Actually, «Black Sabbath» looked more like Tony Iommi's backing band than the real thing, the guitarist being the only original member left... and btw, «Seventh star» was intended to be a Iommi solo effort in the first place but manager Don Arden insisted that it should be labelled a Black Sabbath album. Upon hearing these tapes, one must say that Gillen is quite a revelation... he had very little time to replace Hugues and despite these challenging circunstances, he pulled it off big time, no small achievement considering that he was in fact replacing Ozzy on the early material, Ronnie James Dio (his «Die young» version is sadly prophetic) and Glenn Hugues. Iommi thus hired Gillen for the next Sabbath album, «The eternal idol» and Ray recorded all the lead vocals before he was sacked (or quit, hard to tell what really happened back then) and Tony Martin took over and rerecorded everything. Ironically, Gillen worked on the «Phenomena II» album with Glenn Hugues which he had replaced in Sabbath and they went along quite well. Afterwards, he joined Jake E Lee in Badlands and they recorded three amazing albums (two actually, plus one («Dusk»...