Black Sabbath

• 1. Introduction

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  Black Sabbath placed an advertisement in a Birmingham music shop in the late 1960s that read: "OZZY ZIG Needs Gig - has own PA". That small card in a local window set in motion one of the most unlikely origin stories in rock history. Four young men from Aston, Birmingham would go on to sell over 70 million records, earn a Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and be ranked by MTV as the Greatest Metal Band of All Time. But in the beginning, they were a blues band playing seven 45-minute sets a day at a club in Zurich called the Beat Club. How did a group dismissed by nearly every critic of their era end up defining a genre? How did a band that fractured repeatedly, cycling through dozens of musicians over decades, keep returning to the same stage? And what does it mean that their final concert, on the 5th of July 2025 at Villa Park, came just seventeen days before vocalist Ozzy Osbourne died?

• 2. From Polka Tulk to Black Sabbath

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  Guitarist Tony Iommi and drummer Bill Ward had just watched their previous group, Mythology, break apart in 1968 when they set about building something new in Aston. The band they assembled went through names at a startling pace. First the Polka Tulk Blues Band, a name borrowed either from a talcum powder brand or an Indian/Pakistani clothing shop, the exact origin lost to time. Then just Polka Tulk. Then Earth. Iommi grew concerned that slide guitarist Jimmy Phillips and saxophonist Alan Clarke were not taking the project seriously, so rather than sacking them directly, the band quietly dissolved and re-formed as a four-piece without them. The stripped-down group caught the attention of Jim Simpson, a trumpet player for the group Locomotive who had just opened a new club called Henry's Blueshouse at The Crown Hotel in Birmingham. Simpson offered them a residency in exchange for waiving their usual fee, taking free T-shirts instead. The audience responded, and Simpson agreed to manage them. In December 1968, Iommi briefly abandoned the band to join Jethro Tull, appearing with that group on The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus TV show. He returned by the end of the month, describing the experience as clarifying: "At first I thought Tull were great, but I didn't much go for having a leader in the band, which was Ian Anderson's way. When I came back from Tull, I came back with a new attitude altogether. They taught me that to get on, you got to work for it." The decisive moment came in 1969 when the band was still operating as Earth. A cinema across the street from their rehearsal room was showing the 1963 Italian horror film Black Sabbath, starring Boris Karloff and directed by Mario Bava. Watching people queue to see it, Geezer Butler observed that it was "strange that people spend so much money to see scary movies". Butler and Osbourne then wrote a song called "Black Sabbath", drawing on the horror fiction of Dennis Wheatley and a vision Butler had of a black silhouetted figure at the foot of his bed. The song used the musical tritone, a dissonant interval historically called "the Devil's Interval", and Judas Priest frontman Rob Halford would later call it "probably the most evil song ever written". The band adopted the name Black Sabbath in August 1969, and their first show under that name took place on the 30th of August 1969 in Workington, England.

• 3. Critics Wrong, Crowds Right

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  On the 11th of November 1969, Black Sabbath recorded a four-song session for John Peel's Top Gear radio show on BBC Radio 1, their first exposure to a UK-wide audience. The broadcast aired on the 29th of November 1969. By then the band had already signed to Philips Records and had just two days of studio time booked with producer Rodger Bain to record their debut album. Iommi describes the conditions simply: "We thought, 'We have two days to do it, and one of the days is mixing.' So we played live." Their debut album, Black Sabbath, was released on Friday the 13th of February 1970. It reached number eight on the UK Albums Chart and number 23 on the Billboard 200, where it stayed for over a year. The critical response was savage. Lester Bangs dismissed it in Rolling Stone as "discordant jams with bass and guitar reeling like velocitised speedfreaks all over each other's musical perimeters, yet never quite finding synch". The album sold substantially despite those reviews, and is now certified Platinum in both the US and UK. It is generally accepted as the first heavy metal album. The band returned to the studio in June 1970, just four months after release. Most of the songs on their second album, Paranoid, had already taken shape during those gruelling weeks in Zurich, where the band played seven 45-minute sets a day for six weeks at the Beat Club. The album's lead single was written at the last minute because the band did not have enough songs. Bill Ward recalled: "Tony just played the Paranoid guitar lick and that was it. It took twenty, twenty-five minutes from top to bottom." Released in September 1970, the single reached number four on the UK singles chart, Black Sabbath's only top 10 hit. The album hit number one in the UK and eventually sold four million copies in the US with, as the source notes, virtually no radio airplay. Critics of the era panned it again. Decades later, AllMusic's Steve Huey called Paranoid "one of the greatest and most influential heavy metal albums of all time", and Rolling Stone ranked it at number 131 on their list of the 500 Greatest Albums of All Time.

• 4. Dungeons and Castles

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  Master of Reality was released in July 1971, just six months after the US release of Paranoid, and reached the top 10 in both the US and the UK, certified Gold in less than two months. The band had been running on almost no rest: recording and touring year after year since 1969. By 1972, Ward was articulating what that pace cost: "The band started to become very fatigued and very tired. We'd been on the road non-stop, year in and year out, constantly touring and recording." When work began on their fourth album, Volume 4, at the Record Plant in Los Angeles in June 1972, the band had a "briefcase full of cash" and access to cocaine on a scale that would plague them for years. Ward nearly lost his place in the band during the recording of "Cornucopia" after sitting in the studio unable to perform. Struggling while "sitting in the middle of the room, just doing drugs", he described the aftermath: "I nailed it in the end, but the reaction I got was the cold shoulder from everybody. It was like, 'Well, just go home; you're not being of any use right now.'" The album was originally titled Snowblind after a song about cocaine, and the record company changed the title at the last minute to Black Sabbath Vol. 4. Ward's response was dry: "There was no Volume 1, 2 or 3, so it's a pretty stupid title, really." The follow-up, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, came out of a particularly barren period. Returning to Los Angeles after the Vol. 4 world tour, the band rented a house in Bel Air and could not produce a single usable idea. After a month of failure, Iommi suggested returning to England. They rented Clearwell Castle in The Forest of Dean, rehearsing in its dungeons. Iommi recalled: "We rehearsed in the dungeons and it was really creepy, but it had some atmosphere, it conjured up things and stuff started coming out again." The main riff of "Sabbath Bloody Sabbath" emerged from that environment. Yes keyboardist Rick Wakeman came in as a session player on the song "Sabbra Cadabra". Gordon Fletcher of Rolling Stone called the album "an extraordinarily gripping affair" and "nothing less than a complete success", one of the first positive mainstream reviews the band had received.

• 5. The Revolving Door

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  Iommi fired Ozzy Osbourne on the 27th of April 1979, with Ward chosen to deliver the news. The years of substance abuse had made it impossible to move forward. Ward said of the moment: "Alcohol was definitely one of the most damaging things to Black Sabbath. We were destined to destroy each other. The band were toxic, very toxic." Former Rainbow vocalist Ronnie James Dio stepped in, and his vocal style changed the band's sound fundamentally. Where Osbourne followed the riff, Iommi noted that Dio would "sing across the riff". Heaven and Hell, released on the 25th of April 1980, was greeted by AllMusic as "one of Sabbath's finest records, the band sounds reborn and re-energised throughout". The band's touring capacity under Dio was striking: on the 26th of July 1980, they played to 75,000 fans at a sold-out Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum alongside Journey, Cheap Trick, and Molly Hatchet. But Ward left the band on the 18th of August 1980 after a show in Bloomington, Minnesota. "It was intolerable for me to get on the stage without Ozzy. And I drank 24 hours a day, my alcoholism accelerated." Drummer Vinny Appice replaced him. Disaster struck the tour on the 9th of October 1980 at the Milwaukee Arena, where a show devolved into a riot. The Associated Press reported 160 arrests and $10,000 in damages after a beer bottle thrown from the audience struck Geezer Butler and ended the performance. The personnel upheaval that followed Dio's departure in November 1982 was extensive. Deep Purple's Ian Gillan joined and recorded Born Again, released on the 9th of September 1983, which reached number four in the UK despite scathing reviews. The Born Again tour featured a famous misunderstanding: manager Don Arden ordered a Stonehenge stage set by writing the dimensions in metres when he meant feet, producing a monument 45 feet high that would not fit in any venue. The story was later parodied in the film This Is Spinal Tap. Following Gillan's exit in 1984, Iommi cycled through vocalists including Glenn Hughes, who lasted only four days into a tour before a bar fight splintered his orbital bone, and Ray Gillen, who abruptly departed to form Blue Murder. Tony Martin eventually joined in 1987 and became the longest-serving vocalist of the non-Osbourne, non-Dio years, recording The Eternal Idol in 1987, Headless Cross in April 1989, and Tyr on the 6th of August 1990.

• 6. Reunions and the Final Bow

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  Geezer Butler performing "Neon Knights" with Ronnie James Dio at the Roy Wilkins Auditorium in August 1990 set in motion the reunion of the Mob Rules line-up, though the resulting album Dehumanizer, released on the 22nd of June 1992, cost a million dollars to make and was plagued by tension between Iommi and Dio throughout. The real reunion came in stages. The original four-piece first appeared together on stage since 1978 at Bob Geldof's Live Aid on the 13th of July 1985, in Philadelphia. Butler's summation: "We were all drunk when we did Live Aid, but we'd all got drunk separately." By December 1997, Iommi, Osbourne, Butler and Ward had fully reunited and recorded two shows at the Birmingham NEC. Released on the 20th of October 1998 as the double album Reunion, it reached number eleven on the Billboard 200 and went Platinum in the US. The single "Iron Man" won Black Sabbath their first Grammy Award in 2000 for Best Metal Performance, thirty years after the song was originally recorded. Their final studio album, 13, arrived in 2013 without Ward, who had departed prior to recording. The farewell tour concluded with the band's last concert for eight years in their home city in 2017. Partial reunions continued, including Osbourne and Iommi performing together at the closing ceremony of the 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham. The original line-up then gathered for a final show titled Back to the Beginning at Villa Park on the 5th of July 2025, conceived as the last performance both for the band and for Osbourne as a solo artist. Osbourne died seventeen days after the performance.