Asked how she landed the gig playing on Iommi‘s new album, Baldwin said “I got an e-mail first on just some random Wednesday or something. And I was just sat on my sofa just, like, ‘Oh, today sucks.’ And, yeah, an e-mail came through saying — I think ‘Tony Iommi‘ was the subject. I’m, like, ‘Oh, what’s this?’ And it said, ‘Yeah, I’m Tony Iommi‘s manager. And would you be interested in coming to the studio and listening to some stuff and seeing if you might like to work together with us?’ And I’m, like, ‘What?’ And I’m, like, ‘This is fake. Surely this is fake.’ Looking for every reason why I could justify that it’s fake. But, yeah, I checked the person’s name, their website, and the e-mail, how the e-mail is laid out. And, like, ‘No, hang on, this is real. Let me give this person a call.’ [Laughs] And, yeah, it was a real person, and it was a real job opportunity.”
Regarding how she got on Iommi‘s radar in the first place, Becky said: “Yeah, I did ask that. So it was the producer, Mike Exeter, he’s just been keeping his eye out for bass players. Well, they all have been, but he says he follows musicians that he comes across, just to see what they’re doing in their career, and, yeah, just to see if it might be of use to him in his album production and stuff. And he said he’d been following me for a few years.
And so when Tony was looking for someone, and I’d been posting all my classic metal bass covers, including some BLACK SABBATH, he had something perfect to be, like, ‘Oh, I know a bass player who’s pretty local, and you want someone local. So here’s Becky‘s cover of ‘Children Of The Sea’.’ So he showed Tony that, and Tony was, like, ‘Yeah, okay. Let’s bring her down for a jam and see if she likes the songs.'”
After one of the interviewers noted that Becky‘s bass covers on YouTube seem to be “opening doors” for her in terms of landing her job opportunities, Baldwin concurred. “People like it, fans like it, obviously,” she said. “People who are interested in bass, people who are interested in music but never have heard the bass line so isolated and prominent in the mix, they all really enjoy it. x
And that was a kind of secondary reason to do it. But, actually, the reason why I started doing [the bass videos] in the first place was I wanted to show people in the industry that I can actually play, and the kind of music that I like to play, and this is the kind of music I want to do, and please hire me. So, actually, it worked. It took quite a few years to work.
I was doing it many, many years, and it wasn’t really getting me any job hires and stuff. But it was just growing an audience, and I was, like, ‘Well, this is kind of cool.’ Like, cool secondary reason to do it. And it was helping me get endorsements and all sorts of other kind of stuff, but it felt like it was never gonna get me actually to work with the people that I wanted to work with. Because most jobs like that come through networking and come through you have to know the right people. People wanna hire people that they know personally or they know someone who knows someone personally because, yeah, it’s going blind into a kind of job situation where you don’t really know how this person is going to be. Like, they might be just really annoying [laughs] or —I don’t know — they might just have an anger issue, and you’re then locked on a tour bus with them for five weeks and find it completely intolerable.
So, yeah, most people do hire just from people they know, but how do you get into that circle of people who know the people? So, I was, like, ‘Well, I don’t know any of these people, so I’m just gonna make videos.’ And that built an audience, and then eventually it did kind of go through to the right people. It went through to [MERCYFUL FATE guitarist] Hank Shermann for MERCYFUL FATE, and it got through to Mike Exeter for Tony Iommi. And I think once you then are seen, ‘Well, those people trust you, so maybe we can trust you for this.’ So, yes, all those things just open doors along the way, I suppose.”
Regarding whether the original invite was to record the full album or if it was initially supposed to be just a couple of songs, Becky said: “Well, the invite was to just come and play a song and just get a feel for each other, I guess. They wanted to hear how I approach writing a bass line, how I am under the stress of the red-light recording button being on. And I guess it was all right because they asked me to do the rest of the album. But I think it was always the intention to have the same bass player on the whole thing.
I think, actually, initially, when Tony was writing some stuff, similar to [his 2000 solo album ‘Iommi’], that album of lots of different collaborations with a lot of different musicians, that’s such a cool album, but when he wrote more, he was, like, ‘Actually, this feels like it should fit with just one singer, one drummer, and make the whole album sound cohesive together. And so, yeah, that was brilliant. So I got to do the whole thing.
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