The others who have come out to doff a cap to Sabbath around all this are the city of Birmingham itself. Last weekend, Lord-Mayor Zafar Iqbal presented Ozzy, Tony, Geezer and Bill with The Freedom Of The City in a special ceremony. Then they went off to sign walls of enormous Sabbath street art done by Brum artist Mr Murals. Birmingham Museums have opened a special Ozzy gallery, Working Class Hero.
This is all on top of what’s already there. For years, Home Of Metal have been celebrating the band’s roots and reach through museum work, galleries and events. There’s a Sabbath bench. There’s, somewhat unexpectedly, a Sabbath ballet. There’s a tram named in Ozzy’s honour. You can go and stay in his childhood home (“He’s charging £400 a night – the whole thing was only worth 300!” was Oz’s reaction to hearing the news you could sleep in his old room). After a public vote, the giant bull from the Commonwealth Games, now at New Street station, is called Ozzy. “There’s even a Geezer Butler plaque at Villa Park!” enthuses the bassist.
“We have helped to put Birmingham on the map, I suppose,” reflects Tony. “I always remember when we went to the States, people going, ‘Oh, where are you from? London?’ ‘No, we're from Birmingham.’ ‘Where's that? Birmingham, Alabama?’ No, Birmingham, England!’”
Not that they had much reason to know of it. In the post-war Midlands, the city was an industrial powerhouse that produced metal, not metal bands. It was in a metalworks that Tony had the finger-severing accident that almost ended his guitar career before it even started. As well as working in a slaughterhouse, Ozzy had been employed in one of Brum’s car factories, tuning the horns. Growing up, it was a time of little.
“Aston was heavily bombed during the war, so I grew up playing in bombed-out buildings and in bombed-out vehicles,” remembers Geezer. “There wasn't much to eat as food was still rationed until around 1953. There was no hot water or bathrooms in the houses, or heating, and the lavatories were outside in the yard. You'd almost freeze to death having a plop. The only transport was a bus or your feet, so I didn't get out of Aston very much, until the early days of Sabbath when we were called Earth.”
Even if Geezer says that “it has taken Brum years to acknowledge that Sabbath even existed”, they are now, rightfully, hailed as its proudest sons. If you’ve heard of Aston, it’s likely because of its two institutions: Sabbath and football. This final show could have been bigger, done somewhere else, but that is to miss the meaning. As Sharon says, “It wouldn’t have worked at Wembley. It would be alien.”
“People are going, ‘Oh, why don't they get a bigger place?’” shrugs Tony. “Well, the whole point of it was because of where we lived!”
“Finishing in Aston brings the whole Sabbath story to its conclusion,” explains Geezer. “We all grew up yards from Villa Park, so this is making the whole thing special. We have never played a gig in Aston, we only ever rehearsed there, as there weren’t any places to play, apart from The Elbow Room, which was more of a nightclub.”