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The Cover Story
Black Sabbath: “Finishing in Aston brings the whole story to its conclusion”
This weekend it all ends – Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne will take their final bow, onstage in front of near 50,000 fans in their hometown of Aston, supported by some of the best bands on the planet. Looking ahead to arguably the greatest metal gig of all time, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Sharon Osbourne take us through the show itself, the heady mix of joy and trepidation, and why this is the perfect send-off for the godfathers of heavy...
- Words:
- Nick Ruskell
- Cover illustration:
- WeThreeClub
- Main image:
- Kevin Goff
“It's all in the lap of the gods at the moment.”
This Saturday (July 5), Black Sabbath return home. To Birmingham, yes, but specifically to Aston, in the north-east of the city. Aston, where Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward grew up, where Sabbath formed in the late 1960s, where they first crossed that dividing line between ‘rock’ and what would be ‘heavy metal’.
A mile from the shop that Tony’s parents owned in the Park Lane area when he was a boy (don’t look for it, it’s not there anymore), and half that from Ozzy’s two-bedroom terraced childhood home on Lodge Road, 45,000 people will gather at Villa Park for one final send-off to the four original men in black. Though Ozzy, Tony and Geezer brought the curtain down once already in 2017, just up the road at the arena now known as bp pulse LIVE, the big four, with Bill – the proper Sabbath – haven’t played together in two decades.
This will be The End: there’ll be no loose ends, and a goodbye from Ozzy, whose last planned run of touring was stolen from him by a combination of COVID and his own ongoing health issues. He's said he's interested in recording, should the right thing pop up, but for the stage, this is it. To underline the finality of it all, one of the most ridiculous line-ups in rock history has been assembled, and which could only have happened because of who’s at the top of the bill. “It’s everyone in the business, isn’t it?” Tony astutely observes.
“It's like when you say, ‘What would be the most perfect day in music?’ And that there is, we've got it,” says Sharon Osbourne. “It's just a great occasion, with great people performing. What could be better? It's a celebration of the music. And that is what is so fantastic, that the spirit of it is so pure. It's brilliant.”
Sabbath are, and there are to be no arguments because they will be wrong, the most important band in the history of heavy music. The eight-album run the original members made in the 1970s is a decade of music that helped shape everything that came after. In particular, from their self-titled debut with its rain and its bell, its almighty tritone and its jazzy swing behind Tony's beefy guitars, to 1975's Sabotage, where their ambitions had risen far beyond the low-down heaviness of old, are essential. Paranoid and Master Of Reality are a photo-finish for their finest work, but either way: you'd be sat here listening to 50 years of very different music without them.
The respect in the line-up speaks for itself. Metallica and Guns N’ Roses don’t open for just anyone, much less together. Below that, five decades’ worth of legendary heaviness with a connection and a debt to what they did. Tool, Slayer, Pantera, Alice In Chains, Halestorm and Mastodon will all play. Around that, supergroups made up of legends and curated by Rage Against The Machine’s Tom Morello – at this point, the most stressed man in rock – will come together for genuine one-offs and covers of classic Sabbath and Ozzy cuts.
Who’s playing with who? Time for Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler to jam with II from Sleep Token? Will we get Jonathan Davis surprising us all with a touching rendition of Changes? What can one expect from Papa V Perpetua on the day? Sharon Osbourne reveals to K! that Tom Morello and Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan are down to play together, as a Chicago summit.
But anything else? As Tony says, even around how many tracks Sabbath are going to do, it’s in the hands of fate.
“I’m almost nervous, really, because I don't know what's happening,” he admits. “Normally, when we do tours, we have a plan and we know what's going to happen. But this one, we don't know!”
Geezer’s feeling the same. A while ago the bassist said he’d been having nightmares about the show. And now…?
“I have ordered three pairs of reinforced underpants! I just hope everything goes well on the night. No matter how much rehearsing we do, nothing compares to an actual show. I just pray the monitors are set right, that my nerves don't get in the way and I don't over think everything. When we walk out in front of 50,000 people at Villa Park, and especially as the whole thing is being livestreamed around the world, I'll suddenly become religious again and pray that everything goes to plan.”
What we do know is this: Brummies, they’re coming home. And it’s going to be the biggest celebration rock’s ever seen.
The idea for Ozzy to have a retirement blowout has been percolating for years. Back in 2020, on a visit to see him and Sharon at home in Los Angeles, Mrs O floated to K! the notion that he should do a show with a huge gang of musicians, “everyone you can think of that has some kind of connection to him”, she suggested.
Between then and now, things have changed. Not long after that conversation, Ozzy announced that he’d been diagnosed with Parkin 2. This, on top of the problems he was having following a fall that left him, as he put it at the time, “fucked on the couch, bored out of my fucking mind, feeling sorry for myself all day.”
He could laugh – “I’ve fallen down the stairs drunk, I’ve fucking crashed cars, I’ve fucking nearly died in aeroplanes, and this stupid fucking thing, falling over going for a fucking piss, it’s not exactly Ozzy going out in a blaze of fucking glory, is it? Go for a piss: bang!” – but Ozzy’s days as a road dog were clearly numbered. Between that and lockdowns, the rescheduled tour for his Ordinary Man album was eventually canned.
“This has given Ozzy a reason to get up in the morning”
Today, Ozzy has been “working really, really hard” on getting match fit. “This has given him a reason to get up in the morning,” beams Sharon. “Instead of saying, ‘Oh, I wish I could but I can’t,’ it's a reason to get up every day and do his physio and get himself together.”
This is what the day is all about: courage, spirit, celebrating the greatest band to have ever stepped onto a stage one last time, even if stepping onto the stage has become a challenge to be overcome in itself. Tony even says that Sabbath’s set isn’t locked down yet because of these uncertainties. “It could be five songs, it could be six…” He wasn’t sure about the idea at first, another retirement show. But this sense of importance and finality, and tying things up with Bill, as well as the monies raised going to charity, have swayed him.
“To be perfectly honest, I didn't want to do it,” he says. “I wasn't interested in doing it, purely because we'd finished. To me, the last tour we did was The End tour, and it was called The End for that reason. I didn't really want to do that thing where people retire, then start again, then retire again…
“It’s for charity, which is one of the main reasons I said yes. And musically, it's great because we're with the four original guys, so it's a different thing than it was with The End.”
Geezer felt similar when the suggestion popped up. “I thought, ‘Oh no, here we go again – another final, final, final show.’ But the good thing about it was that it got Ozzy and me communicating again, which we hadn't done since the last 'final' show. He promised it would be his last show, and he wanted to end the whole thing with the original four members of Sabbath. I said if Tony and Bill were up for it, then I'd do it, especially as The End tour was without Bill, and this would be a one-off gig, not a tour, and for charity.”
For all involved, it’s this chance to see one another and play music together again, as well as seeing so many friends who have flown in to be a part of it all, that is the heart of the day. As rehearsals begin, Tony laughs that, “I know we’ll just end up talking for most of the first day, probably all about everybody's illnesses.” Geezer adds, “We still have a laugh together, but we are a bunch of old blokes now, and we all have our various health issues.”
“It’s going to be emotional,” says Sharon. “And I hate to be grim about it, but we're losing so many musical icons all the time. You know, I'm just happy for them that they have this opportunity.”
Indeed, that the four men of Sabbs’ original line-up are still with us and able to grasp the chance to put a bow on things like this is brilliant. It may have been five years since Sharon had the seed of the idea, but Bill hasn’t stood on a stage with his old bandmates in two decades.
“We haven't played with this line-up, with Bill, for 20 years, so it’s great to actually get in a rehearsal room and all play together,” smiles Tony. “But, of course, with an event like this, it's strange going from cold onto a big stage after such a long time. Most of the other bands that are playing are up and running, they're already touring and doing stuff. But us, we’re going from a rehearsal room onto that big stage. So, it'll be a challenge, but it’ll be great to see everybody.”
“I genuinely felt honoured that so many bands wanted to do this”
‘Everybody’, as mentioned, is quite the gathering of musicians. Even with such a bulging docket, Sharon teases that there may be more. Who? “You’ll just have to wait and see.” Everyone involved is where they are because of Sabbath and Ozzy, either directly (being in the bands, or being taken on tour with them) or sheer influence (see heartfelt praise from Tobias Forge, Lzzy Hale and, in a rare moment of actually saying anything, Sleep Token). Both Metallica or Guns would probably find Villa a bit ‘close’, easily able to add 20,000 to the expected turnout. But this isn’t about that. The reason everyone wants to do this is simple: they got asked to be part of a special day with Black Sabbath.
“It's just fantastic, all the bands who wanted to be part of this,” smiles Tony, genuinely touched. “I mean, Metallica don't support anyone else, and to be playing under us, I think it is just brilliant. They've always been lovely guys, I must say, and they've always had the greatest respect for us. Which is really something for a band as big as they are. But they’ve always said what big fans they are, and that feels wonderful to hear.”
“I couldn't ask for a better line-up of bands and musicians,” agrees Geezer. “I genuinely felt honoured that so many of them wanted to do this.”
“Everyone we called, they just went, ‘Yep’,” reveals Sharon. “Nobody asked any of the usual questions about fees or anything like that. Ozzy and Sabbath mean so much to these bands that they just wanted to do it and be there with them.”
The man who’s taken this to the next step and accepted the cat-herding task of co-ordinating the day is Tom Morello. It’s the Rage guitarist who’s putting together the various supergroups, sorting running orders, navigating ideas with what’s actually possible to deliver, arranging who's covering what Ozzy or Sabbath number. As “an incredibly chill guy”, in Sharon’s words, he’s also the diplomat making sure everyone’s happy, the man whose job conceivably consists of telling Axl Rose, ‘Sorry mate, someone’s already picked Dirty Women off of Technical Ecstasy.’
“It's so great that he's come forward to take this on, because it's such a major thing, to organise all these artists and who's playing with who,” says Tony. “They're going to do these supergroups, where different musicians make a band and play a Sabbath song or an Ozzy song, but the amount of organising and going back and forth… I wouldn’t be able to do it! But he’s brilliant, and such a nice guy. And again, he’s a fan, that’s sort of why he’s doing it.”
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.”
As we say, among the massiveness of the day, this simplicity of intent is what keeps it real. That and the charity element. There’s no five-year plan, no record to announce, just four old friends signing off properly. Geezer’s looking forward to playing Paranoid, while for Tony, the prospect of just getting in a room together is pleasure enough.
It will be emotional – partly from seeing them again, partly because the outrageous nature of the bill double-stamps the unambiguous finality of the whole thing. These sorts of events usually only happen when someone is gone. To do it while they’re still here and part of it is privilege indeed.
Afterwards, Ozzy and Sharon are going to “go home, gather our animals and shut the door”. Whatever happens on the night, any problems that may arise will be defused by love and sheer joy. It’s going to be a unique, special, brilliant night to remember.
“For Sabbath to play Villa Park is my dream come true,” is Geezer’s rather endearing view. “I can happily kick the bucket knowing that I finally realised my lifelong dream.”
“I said to Ozzy there's no pressure on anyone except to enjoy yourselves,” smiles Sharon. “There's no pressure at all. Nobody's going to be going, ‘Oh, this one sounded like shit. Why didn't they sing this song?’ We’re all there to celebrate. I hope everyone takes something special home with them. I told Ozzy, ‘Everybody's gonna party.’ That's what they should be doing.”
One last time, then, come to the Sabbath.
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Back The Beginning takes place at Villa Park on Saturday 5. You can watch the entire event on the day and for 48 hours after via the official livestream.
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