Windsor Castle before lunch, a new song after it. Tony Iommi has released Stormwatcher, from his solo album From the Dark, on the same day he received his MBE.
Jorn Lande sings it and wrote the words, and he is on the whole record rather than this one song: he shares writing credits on every track and appears throughout. Becky Baldwin plays bass and Karl Brazil drums. Iommi co-produced with Mike Exeter, who has worked with him for years.
The video is animated, a ship taking a storm, which follows what Lande put in the lyric. "It channels something from within, something real," he said. He described it as a story of struggle and sorrow as a life sails from birth to death and beyond: "We are the captain of our own vessel, a ship crashing through unknown and sometimes challenging waters, always navigating forward, steering steady through every storm."
The album opens with Over the Violent Sun, built on a down-tuned riff of the sort that is the reason he was at Windsor in the first place.