"When the doctors told me I had cancer I thought, 'That's it then'," Iommi tells The Mirror. "Cancer was death as far as I was concerned. I found a painful lump in my groin while I was in New York promoting my book. I thought it was my prostate acting up again, but Ozzy told me I should get it checked out. I came back to England and had an operation to reduce my prostate. It was painless but afterwards I needed a catheter."

"When that came out I went to see the surgeon. He said: 'Good news on the prostate. It's been cut down to a sensible size and everything is good there. But on the lump we took out, we found follicular lymphoma.' It's a type of Non-Hodgkin lymphoma."

Iommi was given an update from doctors, saying "The surgeon told me he doesn't expect the cancer to go away. There's a 30 per cent chance that it could, but more than likely it will come back and it could be any time."