Black Sabbath bowed out with style, headlining a one-day festival on 5 July 2025. Titled ‘Back to the Beginning’, it took place at Villa Park, a football stadium in Aston, Birmingham, walking distance from where the band’s four founding members – Ozzy Osbourne (vocals), Geezer Butler (bassist and principal lyricist), Tony Iommi (lead guitar) and Bill Ward (drummer) – were raised. The supporting bill was comprised of a who’s who of heavy metal, the genre Black Sabbath invented in the early 1970s.

Their classic first six albums constituted the blueprint for everything that came in its wake. Metallica and Guns N’Roses, who haven’t opened for anyone in decades, doffed their caps, sprinkling their greatest hits with deep cuts from the Sabbath back catalogue. Billy Corgan, lead singer of the Smashing Pumpkins, referred to ‘Back to the Beginning’ as one of the musical highlights of his career, admitting that he cried watching Black Sabbath soundcheck. Illustrious guests included Aerosmith lead singer Steven Tyler and Rolling Stones guitarist Ronnie Wood (who, in a turn up for books, now resides part of the year close to my grandfather’s house due to his latest wife being a Brummie, a native of Birmingham). Tom Morello, the former guitarist of Rage Against the Machine and musical director of the charity fundraiser, described his brief as being to curate the greatest ever event in heavy music history. Truth be told, this was never going to be the case in musical terms: a genre which thrived on youthful rebellion and adolescent hormones is entering its twilight years – queues for merchandising are now longer than for the bar.

Less than three weeks later, Ozzy, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2003 (and went public with the condition 20 years later), was dead. The double O has been part of my life for as long as I can remember. I was born in Aston in 1981 – the year in which Ozzy embarked on a successful solo career having been kicked out of Black Sabbath for substance abuse in 1979 – and he was the most famous person to have ever attended my primary school, Prince Albert Junior and Infants.

It was hardly a centre of academic or pastoral excellence by the time I attended (I was given books that predicted man might one day land on the moon, and the drink dependent deputy headmaster took sadistic pleasure in finding pretexts to dish our corporeal punishment to the largely Muslim student body and chase school secretaries about the place in annual Christmas plays, for which he invariably appeared in drag), but I had a much easier time than Ozzy had back in the late 1950s. A tough home life was compounded by undiagnosed dyslexia, and he speaks in his autobiography of being taunted by teachers who took little interest in pupils who were seen as factory fodder at a time when Birmingham thrived as an industrial powerhouse. None of Black Sabbath lived in Aston any longer than they had to, although Geezer Butler’s sister raised her family in the 1980s on the same street as my parents lived.

On the day I was born, 27 March, Ozzy’s debut solo album, Blizzard of Oz, was released in North America. It would go on to sell five million copies in the US; sales of 60,000 in the UK were small fry by comparison. When Ozzy married Sharon Osbourne (daughter of legendary music promoter Don Arden) in 1982, one of the greatest personal and professional relationships in the history of popular music was consecrated.

An almost pathological need for love and approval was what made Ozzy such a committed performer, and he always worked best in collaboration. In Black Sabbath, guitarist Tony Iommi’s killer riffs provided the ideal backdrop for his charisma on stage and vocals on record. His first and best solo albums – Blizzard of Ozz and Diary of a Madman – drew on the prodigious talent of classically trained Los Angeles-born guitarist Randy Rhoads, who died tragically in a freak helicopter accident on 19 March 1982. From this point onwards, Ozzy could still deliver keynote hit singles – ‘Bark at the Moon’ (1983), ‘Shot in the Dark’ (1986), ‘Mama, I’m Coming Home’ (1991) – but, with the exception of No More Tears (1991), for which Mötorhead lead-singer Lemmy Kilmister co-wrote the standout tracks, classic albums were a thing of the past.

Long before reality-TV show The Osbournes (2002-05), which achieved the highest ratings in MTV history, took Ozzy and his family into the mainstream, a cartoon caricature of the wild man of rock already threatened to eclipse arguably the finest back catalogue in rock’s rich pantheon. Ozzy offended the entire state of Texas by urinating on the monument to the Alamo in 1982 and, that same year, inadvertently bit the head off a bat thrown on stage (he believed it was a rubber as opposed to real animal). Events took a more sinister turn in 1985 when the parents of a teenager who had died by suicide took legal action against Osbourne for reputedly inspiring their son’s actions with the song ‘Suicide Solution’. With a similar case taken in the US Bible belt against fellow Brummie metal gods Judas Priest, Ozzy and the genre he represented stood in the dock as public enemy number one.

Ozzy would not have survived economically or psychologically had it not been for Sharon. Spanish promoter, Gay Mercader, recalled to me how she would not flinch while negotiating contracts for future concert performances as her husband urinated on restaurant tables. The madman with a manager who never took her eye off the prize proved to be a winning combination. By the time Ozzy embarked on the first of many farewells with ‘No More Tours’ in 1991, Black Sabbath (who had continued in a variety of iterations since Ozzy’s departure, most successfully with Ronnie James Dio as lead singer between 1979 and 1982) were booked as the support act for the final two dates in Ozzy’s adopted home of California. The original band joined Ozzy for the encore as documented in the Live & Loud double album, which went platinum in the United States and earned Ozzy a Grammy Award.

My first inkling that Ozzy was a global superstar came from watching live footage of the 1989 Moscow Peace Festival in which he appeared on a bill alongside Bon Jovi, the Scorpions and Mötley Crüe. Jon Bon Jovi freely admitted that Ozzy stole the show at the Lenin Stadium, staged, somewhat ridiculously given the participants, for a drugs awareness charity. Piracy had made Ozzy’s songs familiar to the Russian masses, and he embodied a freewheeling rock ‘n’ roll lifestyle like nobody else. That lifestyle came at a cost. A month after returning home from Moscow, Ozzy was arrested in Buckinghamshire for attempting to kill his wife and manager, Sharon, high on a potentially lethal cocktail of booze and cocaine.

In the same year he made his debut behind the Iron Curtain, Black Sabbath, with recently recruited lead singer, Tony Martin, were booked to play one of the first ever heavy metal concerts in Mexico. Coach companies, fearful of a violent heavy metal mob, refused to sell fans tickets to the city of San Luis Potosí. Thirty thousand fans still made the pilgrimage, as did the band, before pressure by the church – who branded Black Sabbath as youth-corrupting Satanists – resulted in the license being withdrawn hours before showtime.

Black Sabbath weren’t the only metal band to be targeted by the Catholic Church in Latin America. In 1992, Iron Maiden were booked to play their debut concert in Chile, but ecclesiastical authorities launched a campaign to persuade local councils and venue owners to ban the Satanic Brits on a mission to corrupt Chilean youth. In 1998, the British Foreign Office advised the band to postpone a gig on the grounds of safety due to a diplomatic fallout between the UK and Chile after Pinochet was arrested in London. Fast forward to the present and Iron Maiden regularly sell-out the National Stadium in Santiago. The Chilean press ran gushing tributes to Ozzy. It was a matter of national pride that, since first playing Chile in the mid-1990s on his ‘Retirement Sucks’ tour, the Prince of Darkness had been a frequent visitor.

There were some religious grumblings 12 years ago when, following the release of 13 – the first Black Sabbath record with the classic line-up since the 1970s – the band were booked to play stadiums in Mexico, but the church no longer wielded the influence it had. Sabbath’s belated Mexican debut became front-page news, celebrated as evidence of the country’s newfound modernity and democratic values. Latin America has been at the vanguard as, against all odds, heavy metal, has been rendered respectable.

‘Black Sabbath: The Ballet’, a pet project of Sabbath guitarist and Cuban dancer and director, Carlos Acosta, which premiered in Birmingham in 2023, contains recordings of euphoric crowds from Buenos Aires. Ozzy has for many decades been Birmingham’s greatest international ambassador, but the city has taken its time in celebrating Black Sabbath’s contribution to culture and music. I quickly lost count of the number of tribute bands I saw playing his music at Birmingham’s Exposure rock café, or  in the nearby town of Dudley, and the band’s two reunion gigs at the NEC Arena (I attended the second, which ranks amongst the best concerts I’ve ever seen) sold out instantly but received little attention from the powers that be.

The UK’s second biggest city has historically been far less savvy than Manchester (home to Oasis) or Liverpool (the birthplace of the Beatles) to capitalise on its remarkable musical heritage, but changes are afoot. There is now a Black Sabbath bench in Birmingham (to which figures as diverse as Metallica and Drake have paid their respects), while an exhibition about the life and times of Ozzy is currently on show at the municipal Museum and Art Gallery. There have been calls for the city’s airport to be renamed in Ozzy’s honour.

Overdue local heritage culture sadly had to wait until almost all of the city’s rock venues had closed, Exposure and JBs relics of a bygone era. We don’t know what we’ve got till it’s gone.