Black Sabbath say last rites in hometown finale
GodisDead?
Black Sabbath, the pioneers of heavy metal, ended their last-ever tour with a final concert in Birmingham, their hometown where it all began nearly 50 years ago.
The godfathers of the genre bowed out on Saturday with a farewell show at the 16,000-capacity National Exhibition Centre Arena in the central English city.
Guitarist Tony Iommi, singer Ozzy Osbourne, bass guitarist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward got together in 1968 and created a sound filled with the brooding menace of horror films.
Sabbath kicked off their mammoth farewell run of 81 concerts, entitled The End Tour, in January last year in the United States.
The world tour took them to Australasia, Europe, North America again, South America, then back to Europe to finish in Birmingham with shows on Thursday and Saturday.
Iommi, 68, the only ever-present member, Osbourne, 68, and Butler, 67 — Ward has not played with the band since 2012 — took to the stage one last time, joined by drummer Tommy Clufetos and keyboard player Adam Wakeman.
Their final song was streamed live on Facebook. The band bowed out with Paranoid, their break- through chart hit from 1970, as ticker tape and balloons blew out over the audience.
Black Sabbath was instrumental in creating heavy metal in the early 1970s with dark and highvolume guitars coupled with a keen interest in the occult.
The hippy peace-and-flowers vibe of the 1967 “Summer of Love” bypassed industrial Birmingham, which instead still rang with the thunder of factories.
On his final day as a sheet metal worker, 17-year-old Iommi accidentally sliced off the tips of the middle two fingers on his fretting hand.
Though his future as a guitarist seemed over before it began, he was determined to continue playing and fashioned fingertips out of melted plastic bottle tops.
The left-hander had to come up with new ways of playing chords, and also tuned down his guitar to a darker, lower tone to make bending the strings easier. The resulting menacing sound spawned the heavy metal genre.
Iommi said Sabbath were “not saying goodbye as such ... we don’t want to do any more world tours.
“I wouldn’t rule out doing a oneoff show. Or even an album. I think the door’s open,” he told the BBC, though Osbourne, said: “As far as I am concerned, this is the end ... I’m not doing it again.”