Back to the Beginning... and The End

This piece got much longer than I originally intended while I was writing it, so here’s the TLDR version:
“Ozzy and Sabbath are legends, they invented heavy metal, which impacted millions of lives (mine included) in ways that people outside it probably won't get. His death is a BIG FUCKING DEAL.”

I feel I should post something about Ozzy dying, partly as catharsis, partly for those that might not quite get why he was important. A lot of you are metalheads so you probably "get" it, but not all of you will be. Maybe you just think “he’s that guy that bit the head off a bat” or “that weirdo from the MTV reality show”

I've thought about posting about the Ozzy and Sabbath “Back to the Beginning” gig a few times, but never really found the words to capture the significance of it, but his death has prompted me to give it a go.

Firstly I need to say up front I’ve never been the biggest Ozzy fan, he’s got some absolutely banging solo tunes (Crazy Train, Mr Crowley etc.) that IMO are largely amazing because of the people he worked with (Randy Rhoads, Jake E Lee, Zakk Wylde etc.) and his Sabbath albums are amazing for similar reasons, but I’ve never really rated him for singing ability - I wouldn’t even put him in the top 3 singers that Sabbath had, and the lyrics were almost entirely written by others (Bassist Geezer Butler in the case of Sabbath). But you don’t have to be the best if you were the first. And let me stress Black Sabbath were the first heavy metal band. Don’t come at me with any of that shit about Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin or even T-Rex (FFS!) unless you really want a face-melting lecture about exactly how wrong you are. Black Sabbath were the first heavy metal band, the song Black Sabbath, was the first heavy metal song, its riff was the first true heavy metal riff. Tony Iommi lost the tips of his fingers in an industrial accident, made new ones himself, down-tuned his guitar, and created the sound that makes heavy metal what it is. That’s not a metaphor - it’s fucking history.

That album - Black Sabbath by Black Sabbath, recorded in a single day at Regent Sound Studios in London, was released on the 13th of Feb 1970 (3 days before I was born) and it changed music. That’s not an exaggeration; an entire genre of music, that has spawned dozens of sub-genres, and inspired dozens more, and literally tens of thousands of bands, was born right there, right then, 55 years ago. Yeah they had their influences, but four men made it happen, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward and of course, John Michael “Ozzy” Osbourne.

OK but it’s only music right? Wrong. For many of its adherents heavy metal is much more than “just music” (whatever that means). It’s a lifestyle, an attitude, an obsession, a commitment, an identity. It’s comfort, familiarity, it’s therapy. Metal is life. It’s often said that heavy metal started in the English midlands among the working classes as a reaction to the bleak industrial deprivation. With a sense of despair driving both the sound and the fans. This sound literally struck a chord with disaffected youth first in the UK and then worldwide. When I discovered rock and metal as a young, likely autistic, teenager with (it would later turn out) a tendency toward dysthymia/anhedonia emerging from a miserable childhood, it felt like something other than bleakness, or sometimes at least like bleakness with company, sometimes like an escape, and sometimes just like feeling something.

Imagine that you take that into your identity: the way you look, how you grow your hair, what you wear, how you permanently decorate/modify your body, what pubs, clubs, gigs and festivals you go to, how you choose your friends and lovers are all influenced by the style of music and the culture that surrounds it, it becomes part of how you define yourself; part of who you are. In defiance of parents, siblings, old friends who don’t get it, teachers, recruitment advisors, potential employers, colleagues etc. who tell you it’s just a phase, that you’ll regret it, that you’ll never get a job unless you cut your hair, etc. - and yet I persisted. I spent the best part of my thirties co-running a website supporting the local scene for free in my spare time, helping launch club-nights, painting venues, and promoting stuff for free, regularly DJing a rock/metal club night to 600+ people for a pittance that barely paid the transport there and back, let alone the cost of buying the music to play, supporting countless local bands, and helping coordinate a promo CD of local bands’ music just to keep the local scene alive - and so on. All, ultimately, because of 4 guys from Aston, Birmingham.

And then there was this gig: Back to the Beginning at Villa Park, Birmingham, UK. Ozzy and the rest of the original Sabbath line-up back where they started it all for one final time twenty years since they last all played on the same stage. Sabbath’s last with Ozzy, Ozzy’s last ever, a stainless-steel-studded line up of rock and metal megastars from among those inspired and influenced by the originals, coming together in celebration of the birth of heavy metal and the men that made it happen, many of whom I literally have the logos and mascots of etched into my fucking skin, and their music etched into my soul - a day of celebration of the music that has defined my life for 40 years.
If you don’t get metal, or maybe not music at all, think of something you do love. If you can, think of something that has shaped who you are. I don’t know if everyone can, but have a go. Maybe you’re a football fanatic and you’ve been following your team for years, going to all the matches, you’ve got their posters on your wall, you wear their kit in your leisure time, you go to pubs to watch when they play, when their players play for your country, and wave your flag. Maybe you’ve even got their shield tattooed on your arm. And then there’s a match. Not just players from your team, but the people that invented the fucking sport, coming out for one last charity match between two teams of luminaries from the history of the game, and I think you might come close to understanding what this was about.

I spent about 3 hours on 3 consecutive days in presale queues and then the general sale on that evil ticketing website trying to get tickets for this gig to no avail. I was absolutely gutted but I got over it. I consoled myself with the fact that the event was going to be streamed “live”; it’d be better than nothing right?

Then about three weeks before the gig, I got an email on a Saturday morning saying a limited number of tickets that had been held back for production were now released for sale. Despite having literally spent the last six months of my working life thinking about little other than cybersecurity, I clicked that link so hard and fast that had it been a literal diabolical phishing attempt I may well have actually sold my soul for rock ‘n’ roll. There were maybe 50 seats showing as available mostly in singles, and you could watch them vanish in real time. After three abortive attempts (“Sorry, these seats are no longer available”) at securing two together - meanwhile my SO had been trying to engage me in conversation about something potentially consequential while this was occurring, and was receiving mere grunts in response because my attention for focussed entirely on the seat map of Villa Park and its disappearing dots - eventually I ended up with two in my basket. I looked up and said “I’ve got two tickets for the Sabbath Gig in my basket and I’m on a time-limit of about 2 minutes; they’re eight-hundred quid!” and she said “just click it!”. So I did.

Fast forward to the day of the gig. After getting up at 5.30AM to drive the 170 miles to Brum we got to the stadium about 12, well in time to take our seats before the first band started. The experience was only very slightly marred by our between-act DJ for the day (Sid from Slipknot, Kelly Osbourne’s beau, and by the end of the afternoon, her fiancee) somehow thinking it was appropriate to kick off the music at the world’s most significant heavy metal concert with 10 minutes (it may have been less, it felt like an eternity) of shite that I am reliably informed was something called “drum’n’bass”. I mean seriously, what a wanker!

Anyway after that, the only way is up, and once he’d mostly stopped dicking about with and/or talking over the music, Sid settled in to playing some standard classic rock fayre with only the minimum of unnecessary fuckery. The changeovers between bands were unbelievably quick thanks to a gigantic revolving turntable allowing one band’s backline to be torn down and the next’s set up by an army of roadies while the current band were playing, keeping any residual self-indulgent DJ nonsense to a tolerable minimum.

And then the bands, and the people from other bands, and the video tributes from other people from other bands — and a few random wildcards from out of leftfield (Dolly Parton and Cyndi Lauper, anyone?). The awesome just never stopped. The whole day (OK, maybe it kinda paused or dipped here and there). There were also some set piece videos where Ozzy had been edited into iconic scenes in classic movies for comedic effect. The big highlight from the videos for me was Jack Black performing Mr Crowley, School of Rock style, with a band of teenagers, including RATM’s Tom Morello’s 14 year old son Roman doing a credible job of filling in for Randy Rhoads on guitar, and Anthrax’s Scot Ian’s boy Revel (13) on bass. Black and Morello recreated the classic Ozzy-Holding-Randy-Up-In-The-Air moment from the Tribute album cover during the solo to roars from the Villa crowd.

Full bands performing sets — each including at least one Ozzy or Sabbath cover — were: Mastodon, Rival Sons, Anthrax, Halestorm, Lamb of God, Alice In Chains, Gojira, Pantera, Tool, Slayer, and Guns N’ Roses and Metallica. Plus two supergroup sets with rotating lineups — members not only from bands on the bill, but also from Blink-182 (!), Red Hot Chili Peppers, Extreme (Nuno Bettencourt deserves extra mention for playing solos on nearly every track), Aerosmith, Van Halen, Badlands, Ghost, The Rolling Stones, Living Colour, Disturbed (somewhat questionably), Rage Against the Machine, and probably a few others I’ve forgotten.

One highlight for many was an appearance by Yungblud, who was a close friend of Ozzy, delivering a stellar and poignant rendition of Sabbath’s Changes that won over a good portion of the initially skeptical crowd, and had us all singing along in one of the strongest bonding moments of the day not provided by the Sabbath themselves.

Another worthy mention was the appearance of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler who sang a couple of his own tunes and then an absolutely blinding cover of Led Zep’s Whole Lotta Love. At 77, turning in one of the day’s strongest vocal performances while cavorting about the stage, is no mean feat - especially when contrasted with the somewhat younger (though still a veteran at 63) Axl Rose’s occasional vocal impersonation of Kermit doing Mickey Mouse.

Add to that the video tributes playing on massive screens between bands (Judas Priest, AC/DC, Def Leppard, Korn etc.) and it became a who’s who of the last 55 years of hard rock and heavy metal. Curated by RATM’s Tom Morello, compered by Jason Momoa — who got into the crowd and joined the circle pit for Pantera — and watched by 45,000 metalheads in the stadium and 5.8 million more online. It raised nearly two hundred million pounds for children’s charities and Parkinson’s research.

And every single person who held a mic on that stage — and every single one who appeared on the video wall — agreed on one thing: that their lives had been irrevocably changed and immeasurably enriched by the four men who were going to appear on that stage at the end of the night. That they wouldn’t be who they were if it hadn’t been for Ozzy and Sabbath. Four men who created a genre, initiated a culture, changed the fucking world for everyone there and millions more.

Then it was time for Ozzy to take the stage. We’d all read the articles quoting Tony after the rehearsals started saying that he didn’t know if Ozzy was going to be able to perform on the day at all. We’d been promised four songs by a solo Ozzy, before the full Sabbath line-up hit the stage together for the first time in 20 years. And then the stage, and the world, turned. A flicker of a riff, and then Carl Orff’s O Fortuna from Carmina Burana blasted from the speakers, and the prince of darkness emerges from a trap door in the front of the stage on a massive black throne decorated with skulls and crowned with an enormous bat. The whole place rises to its feet and there are 160 thousand horns in the air as the roadies move Ozzy into position and surround him with monitors. A shout of “Let me hear you!” and the place erupts into cheers, whistles and screams from the audience while the band take the stage. “Let the madness begin!” shouts the legend, and Zakk launches into the iconic riff of I Don’t Know.

For a man that looks so frail, Ozzy’s voice holds up remarkably well. He sounds better than he did at one gig I saw him at in the height of the madness in the 80s, albeit not quite as good as some of the times I’ve seen him since - solo or with Sabbath. He was clearly nursing his throat, with regular drinks and throat spray between songs, but he totally pulls it off, with what sounded like only the bare minimum of electronic assistance, if any. And the crowd love it. Between songs he tells us how hard the last few years have been for him, how pleased he is to be here doing this one last gig, and how much he loves all of us for being there to share it with him. We get five songs out of him in the end. Mr Crowley, Suicide Solution, Mama I’m Coming Home and Crazy Train. And he grins and gurns his way through it all like a madman, occasionally trying - and failing - to get up out of his seat, which is painful to watch; god knows how painful it must have been for him to do (more on this shortly). Mama I’m Coming Home is particularly poignant; despite originally being a promise to Sharon that he’d come home, clean up and get off the drugs, here it really felt like he was telling us it was the end - little did we know.

Another thing we didn’t know at the time was that Ozzy had chosen to forego his medication for the day. He was in constant pain from an aggravated spinal injury and subsequent unsuccessful attempts to correct it, which he had to take some pretty potent meds to control, but they cause side-effects like brain-fog and slurred speech. Ozzy decided that he’d endure the agony for this day so that he was fully with it and could sing without slurring, for us. This makes it all the harder watching the recording back and seeing him struggle to rise.

And then it was Sabbath’s turn. Four legends together again after 20 years apart. Four lads from Aston, playing in the massive modern stadium of their local football team - at the end of a day of metal monsters paying them tribute. 55 years after the release of their first album. 27 people (give or take) have played in various incarnations of the band over the years, with Iommi being the only constant, but here they were, the original classic lineup, mates from Brum who made a noise that made a genre, that made a culture, that made a difference. There were no speeches here, Ozzy’s strength was clearly waning, they played just four songs (War Pigs, N.I.B, Iron Man and the inevitable Paranoid) from the seven they’d apparently rehearsed, but it was enough. Geezer’s bass thundered, a maestro to the end, Bill (shirtless by the end, apparently causing Tony to tell him “you look like fucking Gollum!”) hammered away at the drums, perhaps not as tight as he was in his prime, but who realistically expected that? Tony’s riffs and solos unmistakably those only a man whose ingenuity following an industrial accident spawned a 55 year phenomenon can deliver. And Ozzy, giving it everything he had left in him, fighting to rise against the pain, but still nailing it harder than some younger, healthier folk had earlier in the day. Then it was - the end. 45,000 shell-shocked metalheads drifted out of the stadium to make their way back to whatever passes for normality out there, irrevocably changed by the experience.

I wanted to say something about it on Facebook, but nothing could quite capture the experience without turning it into a fucking massive essay, so I let it go, saving it for pub anecdotes.

But then, less than three weeks later, Ozzy died, so here’s the fucking massive essay.

It’s hard to explain how hard that sucker-punch landed when I hadn’t quite fully processed the emotional impact of the gig yet. My Facebook feed was 90% tributes to Ozzy from friends and megastars alike. Apparently he was working on a new TV series, a book, new music in the studio, but it felt like he’d just been holding on for his last hurrah. I don’t believe in any kind of afterlife, but I’m glad for Ozzy - and for his friends and family - that he got to share those last moments with them, and us, before he went, and that I was there in person to witness it.

Farewell Ozzy: Madman, Lord of This World, Master of Reality, Killer of Giants, Prince of Darkness. Your ride on the crazy train has come to an end, but your legacy lives on in the hearts, minds and music of thousands of bands and tens of millions of metalheads.