They used the engagement to hone songs Butler was beginning to put lyrics to over Iommi’s industrial-strength riffing. They were booked to do seven 45-minute sets a day. His day job didn’t survive Earth securing a residency at the Star-Club in Hamburg in the summer of 1969, the very same place the nascent Beatles had once worked. Butler was training to be an accountant at this point.

Together the four of them pressed on and formed yet another hard-blues combo, Earth. There they played alongside guitarist Tony Iommi, a year older than them and the bully at Osbourne’s Prince Albert School, and Iommi’s drummer pal, sweet-natured innocent Bill Ward. Soon enough, Butler and John Osbourne, as was, were out of Rare Breed and into the Polka Tulk Blues Band. Rare Breed brought in a new singer, a local tearaway who’d posted up a small ad at the Jones & Crossland musical instrument shop: “Ozzy Zig needs a gig. He switched over to bass after seeing Cream at Birmingham club Mothers, and finding himself mesmerised by their bassist Jack Bruce. Next there was the showier Rare Breed, who performed in Halloween face paint and used flour instead of dry ice for their wannabe elaborate stage shows at the second city’s pubs and clubs.īack then, Butler was on rhythm guitar, a “beautiful red Hofner Colorama”. He started off doing Beatles and Stones covers in a grammar school band, The Runes. He was there on the frigid Thursday night of Decemwhen the Fab Four played at Birmingham Odeon, but couldn’t hear them above the screams of a couple of thousand Brummie schoolgirls. Like countless others of his generation, music arrived with Terence Butler in the mop-topped form of The Beatles. His two eldest brothers were away serving in the Army.

The family crammed into a three-bedroomed terraced house: the three middle boys in one bedroom, mum and sister in another, his dad and him sharing the box room at the back of the house. Both parents were God-fearing and teetotal.

His father James, an engineer, and mother Mary Butler, a housewife, were devout Irish Catholics transplanted to Birmingham from Dublin. He was born Terence Michael Joseph Butler in Aston, Birmingham on July 17, 1949, the youngest of seven children, six boys and a girl. “If I thought of myself like that, I’d start dyeing my hair again and doing me shopping in black leather.” “Rock legends? That’s all very silly,” he says.

Play tell me why by beatles