I couldn’t get a ticket to see them play, so I spent the weekend doing Sabbath-adjacent stuff. I went to Castle Bromwich Gardens to hear legendary Birmingham sound engineer Johnny Haynes talk about recording their first ever demo tape (he even brought the original mic) and visited the one-off exhibition — mostly photos of the Prince of Darkness doing his trademark gurn. Lest I need spell it out: I worship at the shrine of Black Sabbath.

That weekend we celebrated the homecoming of our Prince for what would not only be his final gig, but his final anything. His death was a gut-punch, not just because I love his music, but because he was unapologetically Birmingham. For my entire life I’ve known that to be a Brummie, like Ozzy, is to be a punchline. His behaviour may have earned him a nihilistic nickname, but his accent made him a joke. We Brummies are ridiculed for our cadences and our city mocked for lacking ambition. People forget — or perhaps never knew — that it was once a cradle of innovation and manufacturing. From the industrial to the digital revolution, we were creators.

So people hold their noses and sneer as they drive through on their way to somewhere else. Our city’s stereotype is only compounded by the ineptitude of Birmingham City Council who have managed to bankrupt themselves, close the public libraries, defund the arts, and cause a plague of rats by way of a never-ending bin strike. These days, even the Balti Triangle has lost its edge. And Birmingham’s self-sabotage often makes it fair game for mockery.

We Brummies know this, and defend what was once a mighty city even while laughingly apologising. We’ve developed a protective sense of humour and a fierce loyalty to our roots — just as some of us deny them by concealing our “most hated” accent. Michael Buerk hid his in order to pass through the RP corridors of the BBC, and few would realize that silken-voiced actor Anton Lesser hails from Britain’s second city. I dropped my own singsong inflection for a while (until my sister told me I “sounded posh” on the radio). But never Ozzy.

It took a while for me to find him: I grew up in the Eighties, when Black Sabbath were out of favor, Ozzy having left the band due to “erratic” behaviour. I lived on various Birmingham council estates being something I later learned the middle classes called “underclass”. Benefits class. Criminal class. We had a Social Worker and hid from debt collectors. To be working class was an aspiration. The Nineties — the last good decade — did offer girls like me the potential of upward mobility, but I was playing a game I didn’t understand with a lousy deck of cards. Without money, access to culture was limited, and I didn’t yet know what I wanted. The furthest into music experimentation I’d got was the soundtrack to Miss Saigon and a copy of Harry Connick Jr’s album We Are In Love, when one day my sister came home and declared she was now into rock and heavy metal. Perhaps I might like to join her?

She introduced me to her new friends, boys with eyeliner and bum-length hair, girls in corsets and Doc Martens. As a bookish computer nerd with trauma problems and no affability, I realized I had discovered my people. We united by not fitting in. These black-clad kids weren’t the devil-worshipping, baby-sacrificers we’d been warned about; they were the bullied, the weirdos, the gentle souls with geeky interests, gallows humour and malformed social skills. None of us had thrived in a regular school environment. All of us were poor. But we found each other and the music found us.

They took me to see Metallica at Milton Keynes Bowl, and over the coach’s sound system played me songs from bands composed of people just like us, singing about the fury of the disposable classes. It was here I first heard Ozzy Osbourne wailing Geezer Butler’s deceptively simple lyrical angst about poverty, mental health, the exploitation of working-class bodies, rebellion against organised religion, and the political class’s terror of self-expression.

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It was all oddly familiar. Butler’s father was a military man turned engineer. My dad, though a remarkably intelligent man, had left school at 16 to work in a factory like his father and grandfather, part of Birmingham’s then-still-booming manufacturing industry. He hated it, and promptly joined the RAF which recognized his talents and trained him in engineering. While stationed in Cyprus during the “Bloody Christmas” civil war, he experienced trauma he never talked about, and coped via alcoholism which eventually impeded his ability to hold down a job after the military. He was killed, aged 44, during a street fight with teenage boys. He had had a lot to be angry about, and I, five years after his death, did too.

“People think I’m insane/because I am frowning all the time,” sang Ozzy, whose father was also a factory worker. He had suffered sexual abuse at the hands of school bullies, and attempted suicide several times. And now, here was my personal pain, manifest in Ozzy’s vocals. To the polite, the posh, or the moralizing Christians he sounded terrifying, but I only heard reassurance. I transformed overnight, adopted the black uniform of my clan, and felt safe for the first time in years.

One of the reasons working-class kids want to be singers or footballers is because it’s free to try and, if you have talent, is a potential pathway to riches. Naturally, aged 18, I joined a rock band. Our three-chords-and-the-truth schtick carried us to the dizzying heights of Wolverhampton’s Wulfrun Hall, before we crashed and burned in a fire of mediocrity. But my ambition to no longer be poor did not die. I had learned from Black Sabbath that if you have something to say, you can just stand up and say it, and keep saying it even while you’re shouted down, so I kept trying until I succeeded. I took a different (less lucrative but far safer) path from Ozzy, who climbed to the top of the precarious ladder of fame, addiction and bad behavior.

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But he never rejected his home city or hid his accent, even as he bit the head off a bat and crashed his quad bike. He laughed at himself harder than anyone laughed at him, all the while winking to those of us who were in on the joke. Now I see that same proud sense of humor in a new generation of Birmingham’s working-class performers, from poet Bradley Taylor and artist Tat Vision to comedian Jo Enright (and if you didn’t laugh along with Alison Hammond’s chaotic interview with Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling, then you will never get us).

When earlier this year, Ozzy, aged 76, was offered the Freedom of Birmingham, he said, “Really, me? But I’ve been in prison!” This was surely more sardonic winking from a man who has sold over 70 million records. He knew that for many, once an underclass Brummie, always an underclass Brummie. But it also acknowledged, to me: more fool those who underestimate us. It was an honor to be a small part of his final homecoming in a misunderstood city, smiling at strangers, united by Ozzy. A working-class Brummie who took the punchline and turned it into a power.

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.

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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 favored 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 traveling through time, seeking revenge.

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, synthesizers 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. 

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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.

Seven-year-old Terry Butler, known to his friends as Geezer, was a thoughtful child, one of seven from a devout Irish Catholic family “with no money whatsoever”, who trod those tough streets with glimpses of beauty and a world beyond, where the vinegar run was big news that left a bad smell. Ten years on, he would form a friendship with a local lad even poorer than he was: John “Ozzy” Osbourne, a shoeless skinhead with whom Geezer, by then an unlikely trainee accountant, formed a band, heavy into the blues and the Beatles. They called themselves Rare Breed.

Geezer’s girlfriend knew a bloke called Tony Iommi, already an experienced guitarist, with a roster of bands behind him. The three of them then met a drummer, Bill Ward, also from Aston, now calling themselves Earth. But Geezer’s brother was a big Dennis Wheatley fan, who had seen the Hammer horror film Black Sabbath, which Geezer thought would make a better name.

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Geezer usually wrote the lyrics to Black Sabbath’s music, but the opening lines of the eponymous opening track of their self-titled debut, released 50 years ago today, were written by Ozzy. “What is this that stands before me? Figure in black that points at me”, run the opening lines, the only lines in the history of British pop and rock music that created an entirely new, world-conquering genre: heavy metal. Black Sabbath can claim to be second only to the Beatles in the influence that a British band has had on the world.

The track “Black Sabbath”, one of seven songs recorded in a 12-hour session on 16th October 1969, opens with the sound of rain, before the diabolus in musica of Tony Iommi’s genre-defining riff bends up and down as Butler and Ward, as fine a rhythm section as any in rock, play with the space behind, a bewildering echo of the drop-forges, chain-making and sheet steel works that dominated the aural landscape of Birmingham and the Black Country in their pomp before the Thatcherite assault on manufacturing.

It was not just the sound of the surroundings that created heavy metal, but the dangers of the physical creation of metal and dirt. As a 17-year-old, Iommi had lost the tips of the middle and ring fingers of his right hand in an accident at his final shift at a sheet-metal factory in Lozells, after returning from a European tour with one of his first bands. He almost bled to death in hospital, where the tips of his fingers were returned in a matchbox by a colleague.

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Had the accident not happened, Iommi would have been just another guitarist with a passion for the blues. But, cauterising the plastic from a washing up bottle onto the tips of his fingers, and inspired by the jazz guitarist Django Rheinhardt, whose hands had been badly burned, Iommi detuned his guitar, filed down its frets and the ultimate riff maker was born.

As was the genre Sabbath invented, mastered and in which they remain unsurpassed. The debut album was followed up that same year by the LP Paranoid, which gave them a hit single, saw Butler’s lyric writing expand and the band define their sound. YouTube footage of a gig in Paris in 1970 shows the group at their early peak, performing War Pigs, Butler’s bitter attack on the Vietnam War.

Ward’s drumming is possessed, his tiny kit assaulted to exhaustion, Butler weaving bass lines like a web inbetween. Ozzy, then unravaged, despite spending the advance for Black Sabbath on a new pair of shoes and a bottle of Brut, delivers like a man who can’t believe his luck, while Iommi looks on with that humble, knowing look of his, master of what he surveys.

The run of great LPs that followed — Master of Reality, Volume IV (worth the entry price alone with the insane riff of “Supernaut”, and its closing line of “I’ve seen the future and I’ve left it behind”), Sabbath Bloody Sabbath and Sabotage – cemented the reputation, despite the slow attrition of booze and cocaine, from which they’ve now all returned. But my God, it took time to gain recognition. Like the Stooges, their great American counterparts, born of that other motor city, Detroit, it took a while for the world to catch up with their dumb brilliance.

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Last year, their home city honoured them with an exhibition at its City Museum and Art Galleries, where their axes and amps, and Aston Villa plectrums shared space with the Pre-Raphaelites. Thousands visited from all over the world. But the best bit of the exhibition was the first: a vast grainy visual montage of Aston in the 1970s, the same street I walked with my Aunt Rose, where you could smell the sauce and taste the metal in the air.

The soundtrack in the room was of the drop forges that we felt with a familiar judder in our home every half hour on the dot. It was the sound that Sabbath turned into music, a genre all, their own: Made in Aston for the world.