Looking For Today

I started writing some thoughts about Back to the Beginning, Black Sabbath's homecoming gig in 2025, just after the show. Little did I know that 17 days later, Ozzy Osbourne would no longer be with us, and my focus then shifted from thoughts on a gig, to reflections on a lifetime. A year has now passed, and it feels like a good time to share...

I think it’s become something bigger since the godfather of Metal’s passing…there’s a huge heavy weight in the air of Birmingham, uncertainty (the end of an era? what will come next? where do we go from here?) for Metal heads across the globe, but also a beautiful outpouring of love.

A day has passed since the rock ‘n’ roll wild man's passing, and Ozzy’s image is on billboards everywhere, Mr Murals incredible artwork (which had galvanised people throughout the summer) has become a place of reflection and remembrance (as flowers line the streets) whilst a huge TV screen blasts out Ozzy’s songs to passers-by… I mean if you’re going to go, what’s more Heavy Metal than having your songs cranked up to eleven, and blasted out across Birmingham City Centre?

So where did my love affair with Sabbath start? It started in the now defunct Music Zone in Sutton Coldfield. Aged 13 I picked up two albums, (I’d love to claim they were “classic” albums, but they were two best of’s) a Black Sabbath best of, and a Motörhead best of, both released in 2000. Apart from hearing the obvious songs, I was drawn to them by the album covers, Black Sabbath’s had a picture of a graveyard on it, and Motorhead’s had a picture of Lemmy (looking like a badass) on it (standard). Those albums (for better or for worse) would ultimately go on to change my life… Not that I stood much of a chance, metal/rock music seems to be ingrained into my family.

I still remember the first time I listened to that album, I sat down on my bed, put the disc into my cd Walkman, put the headphones on, and lay back. My instant reaction was “what is this!?” It was like nothing I’d heard before, said in a way that’s never been said before, it’s heavy, it’s dark, it’s scary, it’s dangerous, and it’s exciting! They sounded like four men that knew something about the world that you didn’t. That was it, I needed to own everything by them! Which is exactly what I set out to do. But then you want to learn more about the band… you want to know where this music came from, who are these people, how did they create this sound? So when you learn that it’s four working class lads, who have the same accent as you, who grew up in an area that your great grandparents and grandparents came from, it can’t help but give you hope, and you can’t help but feel a personal connection to it, it just so happens that the thing that you feel a personal connection to, also just happens to be the very thing responsible for creating a whole genre of music, changing the musical landscape, and arguably being the most important band since the Beatles.

When the Back to the Beginning show was announced, I couldn’t quite believe it, the poster almost looked like a fan made fantasy festival line up, a friend of mine sent it me, to my reply of “is this real?”, it seemed too good to be true, but there it was all over social media. I’d seen Bill Ward (Black Sabbath drummer) saying he’d love to play with the band again, but I thought it would take a miracle for that to happen, given that Ozzy had been forced to previously cancel his “No More Tours - Vol 2” tour, and then there’s the question of whether Bill was going to be up to it, I mean how long has it been? But if there was one thing I was sure of, it was that I was not missing this show! If they’re going above and beyond to be there, then the least I can do is show up.

Fast forward to the day of the gig. I’m standing outside Villa Park at 10am waiting to go into the stadium, I’m like a kid on Christmas Day (despite the fact I’ve had some form of Flu all week) there was no way I was ever missing this show! It had taken me four days to get a ticket after endlessly trying, I’d started to think it was called “Back to the Beginning” as that’s where Ticketmaster kept taking me. Like most stadium gigs these days, I’d bankrupted myself in the process. I guess music has become somewhat of a luxury for people, if it wasn’t for payment schemes and going without for a month, I alongside many others, probably wouldn’t be able to afford these things, and most still can’t… But as the proceeds were going to charity, I’d made peace with it in my mind, and this was a once in a lifetime opportunity. How often do you get to see the original members of a band from that era in person, playing a show together, not to mention still being friends after all these years?

As Ozzy took to the stage, I almost wasn’t ready for it, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but at the same time everyone in that stadium was rooting for him, if he couldn’t sing it, we’d sing it for him, everyone had his back. And then before I knew it, he was rising through the floor, sat on a throne, dressed in a black gown, with Carl Orff’s - Carmina Burana: O Fortunas blasting out to a rapturous applause of deafening levels, and then he says… “let the madness begin”. It was track 4 “Mama I’m Coming Home” that really got everyone, before he went into it he said “I’ve been laid up for six years, and you’ve got no idea how I feel, thank you from the bottom of my heart” whilst looking visibly touched and upset. For me it was a full circle moment, the guy singing that song is the frontman of one of the albums that I bought from Music Zone, and the guy who wrote that song is from the other of those two albums that I bought.

Then it was time for Black Sabbath, four guys from working class Aston, about to do it one last time, literally a few mins from where they all grew up. The only way I can describe it is if you imagine these guys playing in a club somewhere (a lot like it would have been when they started out) and these guys in their seventies just got up as mates and gave it a go, it wasn’t perfect, but my god was it powerful! They could have just stood there and no one would have minded, because standing before us was the four original members of Black Sabbath. It felt incredibly spiritual, it’s hard to put into words. For me Black Sabbath is a band in the truest sense of the word, it doesn’t work without the four of them, it’s greater than the sum of its parts.
They don’t come across as four muso’s, it almost seems like it was a happy accident...

Three weeks and three days later, I’m now standing in a sea of people, who have come out in their tens of thousands to say goodbye to the Prince Of Darkness, phones in the air, I just couldn’t bring myself to reach into my pocket, because at that moment, I was clapping like my life depended on it, feeling each individual clap as tears rolled down my face, I was almost hoping he could hear it, I wished he could hear all of it, just so he could hear what he’d done, the boy from Aston who came from nothing, who didn’t even have shoes on his feet when he joined Earth, whose father took a chance and got himself into debt for his boy, who just went looking for a good time…

To me they represent something that no longer exists in the business today, which seems robotic and calculated now, but here you had four working class kids, who had a dream, who just got up there and gave it a go… For me it felt like the end of something, we’ll never see a working-class band go from nothing to changing the world again, well at least not on that scale. But this is why I think it is important for Birmingham to get behind music and the arts, and celebrate what we have; look at how many lives Ozzy and Black Sabbath touched, this is how important music is to people, it can literally change lives, and if we celebrate it, hopefully they’ll be another generation who can go on to change another person's life and maybe even the world?

Thanks for giving a working-class kid a reason to dream.