Bill Ward says that he "would be very open-minded to any ideas" about playing with his BLACK SABBATH bandmates in the future. Ward was on board for the SABBATH reunion when it was first announced more than seven years ago, but backed out soon after. The drummer later claimed that he sat out the recording and touring sessions because of unfair contractual terms, although the members of SABBATH have hinted in other interviews that he wasn't physically up to the task. On July 2, Ward tweeted out a brief video message in which he said: "Hi everybody. My name is Bill Ward, and I wanted to say that I love Tony [Iommi, guitar], Geezer [Butler, bass] and Ozzy [Osbourne, vocals] very much. I've loved them for a long time, and I still do. And I would be very open-minded to any ideas about playing together in the future. That's it. Love you all. Thanks." This past May, Ozzy said that Bill should have been part of BLACK SABBATH's final tour. Asked to elaborate on his previous comment that he didn't really enjoy his last tour with BLACK SABBATH — the band's farewell trek which ended in February 2017 — the singer told Kerrang! magazine: "I didn't like the fact that Bill Ward wasn't there, for a start. People put that down to me, but it wasn't me, honestly. We [SABBATH] didn't have the fucking time to hang around, we had to get going, but I'm sorry it didn't work out with Bill. Tommy [Clufetos, Ozzy's drummer, who played with SABBATH on the farewell tour] did great, but the four of us started this, and it should have been the four of us ending it. Those final gigs in Birmingham were bittersweet because you think of how far we came, and how much we did, and it would have been good to have shared that together. Maybe one day there'll be one last gig, I don't know." All four original members of SABBATH were present when the band announced its reunion in late 2011. But Ward split from the group in 2012, citing an "unsignable" contract, and Osbourne, Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler carried on with their Rick Rubin–produced "13" LP and extensive international touring without him. Ozzy told The Pulse Of Radio during SABBATH's last tour that Ward was not in shape to participate. "Bill Ward has got the most physically demanding job of the lot of us, 'cause he's the timekeeper," he said. "I don't think personally he had the chops to pull it off, you know. The saddest thing is that he needed to own up to that, and we could have worked around it, whether we had a drummer on the side with him or something." It was rumored that SABBATH wanted to bring a second drummer on the road to share duties with Ward, something that Iommi confirmed in 2017 during a question-and-answer session about SABBATH's "Ten Year War" box set.
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