From the Dark, Tony Iommi's first solo album in twenty one years, comes out on Friday 23 October. The night before, metal and rock bars in eighteen cities will play it from beginning to end.
The list reads like a map of where the audience actually drinks: Scruffy Murphys in Birmingham, which is the obvious one, then Duff's in Brooklyn, Bar Loose in Helsinki, Excalibur in Amsterdam, Rockcafe Halford in Berlin, Escobar in Copenhagen, Helgis in London, Wrong Way in Madrid, and ten more.
Entry is open to anyone and the bars are handing out limited merchandise and copies of the record, with start times left to each venue's own channels. Which is the useful detail: this is being run through the venues rather than through a promoter, so the night works like a local gig rather than a product launch.
Nobody has to be told why a listening party in a Birmingham pub is the right venue for this particular record. The man who wrote the first Black Sabbath riff is releasing a solo album at seventy eight, and the places playing it are the places that kept his band's music going between the reunions.