When Black Sabbath play their final concert, “Back to the Beginning” on Saturday, it will bring to an end the career of the second most influential British band of all time. The elderly fathers of heavy metal will bid farewell to their fans in Villa Park, Birmingham, the city where it all began nearly 60 years ago, supported by their not-quite-as-aged offspring, Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax, among many other acolytes of the primal riff.
This is not the band’s first farewell. After multiple breakups, regroupings and reincarnations, three of the four original members previously attempted to exit the stage in 2017. The plan was to bow out after a world tour titled, appropriately enough, “The End”. The years were taking their toll: Ozzy Osbourne, once legendary for his stage antics, now hung onto his microphone stand and barely moved, while guitarist Tony Iommi had to return to the UK every six weeks for blood tests to ensure that his stage three lymphoma had not returned. Bassist Geezer Butler seemed to be doing alright, but after the tour he stopped dyeing his hair and went home to catch up on his reading — not just acting his age but embracing it, content to put his touring days behind him.
There was, nevertheless, a sense of unfinished business. Drummer Bill Ward had refused to participate, blaming an “unsignable” contract (Ozzy retaliated that he was no longer capable of playing his parts). But now Ozzy, having survived a life of such extremes that he once seemed unkillable, has undergone four surgeries for a spinal injury and is beset with other health issues, including Parkinson’s. Mortality is on his mind; in 2022, aged 73, he announced he was returning to England (“I don’t want to be buried in fucking Forest Lawn”). But rather than go gentle into that good night, there will be one final gig. Ward, who has survived several heart attacks himself, has reconciled with his old bandmates and will join them on stage. Geezer has temporarily come out of retirement. Iommi never really stopped. But this time it really does look like The End.
They have come a long way since their early days as The Polka Tulk Blues Band, a name allegedly inspired by a brand of talcum powder favoured by Ozzy’s mother. Birmingham back then was still an industrial powerhouse, far from the garbage-strewn sinkhole it is today. Other industrial cities — Newcastle, Glasgow, for example — were considerably grimmer, yet while they produced the likes of Lindisfarne and The Sensational Alex Harvey Band, Birmingham and its environs spawned bands with a harder edge. Robert Plant and John Bonham of Led Zeppelin hailed from nearby Bromwich, Judas Priest would follow in Sabbath’s footsteps, while in the Eighties Napalm Death emerged from darkest Meriden.
When it comes to heavy metal, however, Sabbath are the source. Industrial machinery was directly responsible for the band’s sound: Iommi lost the tips of two fingers to a steel press on his last day working at a factory. Undaunted, he melted down a Fairy Liquid bottle to create makeshift prosthetics. He then altered his style to accommodate the injury, playing simpler chords, more slowly. The heavy, grinding sound matched their defiant attitude and sense of themselves as outsiders: Ozzy had grown up in poverty, Iommi and Geezer were the children of immigrants. As Ward put it: “There was this force, all this resentment and anger that was coming out. It came from what we thought was bullshit at the time: politics and war, and upbringing and people’s ways of life.”
But the band’s sinister tritones and penchant for occult imagery owed as much to shrewd commercial instincts as it did to self-expression. Blues bands were sprouting like mushrooms after rain in England in the Sixties; they had to differentiate themselves. As Geezer put it, people liked scary films so why not make scary music? So the band (by now “Earth”) renamed themselves after a film starring Boris Karloff and tapped into the post-flower power occult zeitgeist. Channelling the likes of Dennis Wheatley and Aleister Crowley, they wrote songs about Satan, wizards and a “big black shape with eyes of fire” — not to mention drugs, death, war and an iron man travelling through time, seeking revenge.
“The band’s sinister tritones and penchant for occult imagery owed as much to shrewd commercial instincts as it did to self-expression.”
Black Sabbath recorded their eponymous 1970 debut LP in a single, 12-hour recording session. Roundly despised by the critics, it was a roaring success with the kids, so they returned to the studio and made the follow-up, Paranoid, four months later. This time they had a luxurious six days. These albums, and the two that followed, Master of Reality and Volume Four, laid the foundation for a sound that was to conquer the world. Contemporaries like Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple played heavy riffs but their ethos was hard rock, steroidal blues, even R&B, with (in the instance of Zeppelin) a whiff of Tolkien. Sabbath’s mutant blues, with its themes of angst, doom and horror, came straight from the depths of the abyss. Their streak of memorable riffs was unparalleled: applied to their music, terms like “sludge” and “grinding” became superlatives. Their influence spread. Judas Priest added another guitar and shrieked higher. Lemmy left space rockers Hawkwind to form Motörhead, turned up the bass and played faster. In Britain, in Europe, in America, in Asia, countless bands discovered endless possibilities within Sabbath’s elemental sound. Play louder, thrashier, slower; sing in a falsetto, sing like Cookie Monster; add blast beats; turn the riff into a drone; play in complex time signatures. Actually take the Satan stuff seriously, set fire to churches, murder your bandmates.
Yet, for all the variations of metal that exist today, no one has surpassed the work of the originators. While their heirs burrow ever deeper into narrower, more niche sounds, Black Sabbath were always looking outwards. They were fans of The Beatles, of blues and jazz; Iommi loved classical music and strove to bring its “tension and drama” to rock. Bill Ward made their songs swing, while Geezer found the groove in even Iommi’s heaviest riffs. The otherwise monumental “Supernaut” from Volume Four incorporates a calypso section, while Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, their most creatively expansive album, features strings, synthesisers and the lyrical piano of Rick Wakeman, plus a psychedelic song about DNA called “Spiral Architect”.
After that, things get a bit diffuse. Sabotage is a solid album, and while Tony Iommi (and myself) both think that Technical Ecstasy is a classic, many would disagree. By 1978’s Never Say Die, however, the band was undoubtedly creatively exhausted. Ozzy left, taking his unique wail with him. He was replaced by Ronnie James Dio, a much better singer who brought new life to the band, and yet something was lost. Black Sabbath stumbled ahead with an array of vocalists, while Ozzy rose to superstardom under the management of his wife Sharon, becoming first the Prince of Darkness, and later a barely coherent Heavy Metal Homer Simpson on The Osbournes. Bill Ward left, Geezer and Iommi soldiered on, then Geezer left, then Iommi cycled through more incarnations of the band until Ozzy rejoined in 1997.
Given the advanced age and shaky health of the band, it is tempting to see them as a metaphor for the decay and decline of Birmingham itself, a city which has seen much better days. In fact, when Black Sabbath formed, in 1968, the city had a higher standard of living than most of the country. The factories were still working; the tower blocks were new. Even the Bullring, the notorious concrete carbuncle long reviled as a symbol of the excesses of brutalism, was in those days regarded as a cutting-edge vision of the urban future.
It took Birmingham some time to catch up with Black Sabbath’s lyrical and musical vision. Between 1971 and 1981, Birmingham lost 200,000 jobs as the manufacturing sector went into decline. The recession that began in 1979 caused the economy to collapse, and by 1982 the unemployment rate had surged to 20%; it stayed elevated through the end of the decade and beyond. Suddenly songs such as “Hand of Doom”, “A Hard Road”, “Children of the Grave” and “Into the Void” provided the perfect soundtrack for a city in crisis. And yet by this time Ozzy was a mega star, Geezer was happily married, Iommi was living in a Warwickshire mansion with stained glass windows and Bill Ward had retreated to the LA beach where he would work on his strange, introspective album Ward One: Along the Way.
Now Birmingham, bankrupted by an equal pay lawsuit, can’t even provide as basic a service as collecting the garbage. As for Black Sabbath, there is real anxiety as to whether they will even be able to perform. Iommi has cautioned fans that Ozzy can no longer play a full set and may be seated. Geezer described a nightmare to The Guardian: “I dreamed everything went wrong onstage and we all turned to dust.”
And yet it would ultimately be deeply unfair to compare the aged Black Sabbath to their dilapidated hometown. They rose from the humblest of beginnings and created a genre of music that spoke to millions. For all their ups and downs, despite all the drugs, alcohol and lawsuits, they remained loyal to each other at the end and are bowing out as conquering heroes. Even if Ozzy is confined to a chair and yowls into the microphone for 20 minutes, the fans will receive those final yowls with gratitude. “Birmingham forever,” says Ozzy. Yeah, probably not. Black Sabbath forever? Now you’re talking.
