Black Sabbath

Birmingham NEC December 4/5, 1997

It was the night heavy metal came home. All four original members of Black Sabbath on the same stage in the city of their birth for the first time in almost 20 years.

Of course, Sabbath had never officially split up, merely trundled along with a rotating line-up of ringers orbiting ever-present guitarist Tony Iommi. The latter had even reunited with Ozzy Osbourne and Geezer Butler for a run of dates under the Black Sabbath banner on the US Ozzfest earlier that year (no Bill Ward that time, proving that with Sabbath some things never change).

But their two shows at the Birmingham NEC at the tail-end of ‘97 were something else. This wasn’t a late-career cash-grab; it was four working-class outsiders who inadvertently forged everything

that followed, putting aside years of petty rancour and reaffirming both their musical godhead and their personal friendships.

What did they play? Oh, everything they always played: War Pigs, Iron Man, Paranoid, Black Sabbath itself. Back then they still chucked in some curve balls too, this time in the shape of Electric Funeral, Lord Of This World and an unexpected Spiral Architect.

But it was about more than just the music. By the end of the shows on both nights, grown men were visibly weeping. Black Sabbath had come full circle, and with them heavy metal had too. It was, as they say, emotional.