Of portentous lineage, Gigger Buttler wasBlack Sabbath’s secret weapon, an instinctive innovator and scribe of their seminal lyrics. But behind the doom and anguish of Sabbath's songs, and the slapstick comedy of their career, there brooded a man fighting for his sanity. "It was like this big black cloud came over me and I couldn't get away," he tells mark Blake.

BLACK SABBATH’S BASSIST TERENCE ‘Geezer’ Butler had visions as a child. He blames them on the mystical power of the number seven, with its corresponding ages of man and deadly sins. “I was the seventh child of a seventh child,” he says, “and I was born in ’49, which is seven times seven.” Butler’s first premonition was seeing an orb circling his bed and revealing his future self, wearing platform boots and with waist-length hair. Quite something for a 1950s kid in Aston, Birmingham, to visualise.

“I told my parents,” says Butler, his Brum burr only slightly softened by years living in the US. “But they just presumed I’d had a nightmare.”

It’s just one of many visions and nightmares – real and metaphorical – recalled in the 73-year-old’s new memoir, Into The Void: an epic odyssey of one of rock’s unlikeliest stars, and one of its most powerful and innovative bands. If Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple unwittingly helped create heavy metal, then Black Sabbath defined its subject matter and iconography. Butler’s earthquaking bass was a cornerstone of their 1970 Top 5 UK hit Paranoid and albums including Master Of Reality, Vol. 4 and Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. But he also wrote most of their lyrics: about “war, poverty, famine and pollution – the stuff everybody else was avoiding.”

Butler decided to write an autobiography after becoming a grandfather. “I wanted something for the grandkids to remember me by,” he explains, “because when my mum and dad died there was so much I didn’t know about their lives.”

Butler began writing during the pandemic while isolating at his home in Utah with second wife and manager, Gloria. Into The Void follows Sabbath vocalist Ozzy Osbourne’s I Am Ozzy and guitarist Tony Iommi’s Iron Man memoirs. “I read some of their books,” he says, cautiously. “But I wrote this myself, because it had to definitely be me.”

BUTLER WAS BORN INTO AN IRISH CATHOLIC family in a post-war Birmingham blitzed by the Luftwaffe and in awe of the church. There was plenty to rebel against. “Benediction every Friday,” he recalls, “confession every Saturday, mass every Sunday and the nuns at school beating me every day.”

He bought an acoustic guitar with two strings from a schoolfriend for 10 shillings, saw The Beatles at Birmingham Odeon (“I was dazzled”), and was nicknamed ‘Geezer’ by his brother, Jimmy, who’d just completed his National Service in a squadron full of Londoners.

Before long, Butler was a guitar-playing non-meat eater (“I’d never heard the term ‘vegetarian’, I just didn’t like meat”) who refused to cut his hair and was determined to leave the Midlands. When he spotted local boy-made-good, Traffic’s Stevie Winwood, wafting around Aston in a kaftan, “I thought, If he could escape, why couldn’t I?”

By 1968, Butler was working as a trainee cost-and-works accountant at Spartan Steel, before quitting to focus on his group, the Rare Breed. His family were outraged, particularly when local misfit, John ‘Ozzy’ Osbourne, arrived at their house to audition as lead singer. “My brother said, ‘There’s something here to see you.’”