Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne head back home for their last show
Nearly six decades after helping create heavy metal music with an eponymous song that enthralled and frightened audiences, Black Sabbath will return to their home of Aston for "Back to the Beginning" at Villa Park stadium.
The one-off gig, with profits going to charity, has been billed as Ozzy's last performance, five years after the 76-year-old "Prince of Darkness" revealed he had Parkinson's disease.
More than a dozen other acts including Metallica, Guns N' Roses and Slayer are set to perform in tribute to Sabbath in the once-industrial English city considered the birthplace of the genre.
"The goal is a very simple one, and that is to create the greatest day in the history of heavy metal as a salute to the band that started it all," Rage Against the Machine member Tom Morello, the music director for the event, told Metal Hammer magazine.
The gig will unite Sabbath's original lineup of bassist Geezer Butler, guitarist Tony Iommi, drummer Bill Ward and frontman Ozzy for the first time in 20 years. Fans can expect performances of "Paranoid", "War Pigs", "Black Sabbath" and Ozzy's "Mama, I'm Coming Home".
Hotel prices in Birmingham have sky-rocketed and Sabbath murals and banners have started appearing across the city, whose factories were one of the influences for the band's heavy sound of loud, distorted guitar and aggressive vocals.
Lisa Meyer, who organised a Black Sabbath exhibition in Birmingham in 2019, said the band won over followers by offering a heavier alternative to the Beatlemania and hippy music of the 1960s.
"That's what really resonated with fans, giving a voice to that rage, anger and frustration, but doing it in a really cathartic way," Meyer, co-founder of the Home of Metal project, told Reuters.
Saturday's extravaganza will also feature performances by Lamb of God, Pantera, Anthrax, Tool, Gojira, Alice in Chains and Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst.
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'Parents can't be expected to police this — it's just not possible,' he says. Neither should we put our faith in the platforms to self-regulate, given their main concern is their bottom line. 'It's a very competitive market and they are focused on monetisation, so they're not going to change.' YouTube told The Sunday Times: 'We have strict advertising guidelines on YouTube Kids, and don't allow paid promotional content.' If we can't leave it to individuals or the free market to tackle, that leaves just one actor that might make a difference: governments. Ward knows that might not be popular with some people, but makes a point I think most parents will agree with. 'We all accept that there are some things that are important as a public service, whether it's the armed forces or parks, and that those things need taxes to support them and sometimes regulations,' he says. 'When it comes to our children having access to high-quality content and not just utter drivel, that too is surely a social good?' The present government has already indicated it will take action. Late last year the culture secretary, Lisa Nandy, wrote to YouTube urging it to make high-quality programming more visible on its platform. She also suggested that, if this doesn't happen voluntarily, regulation might force its hand. YouTube told The Sunday Times that it 'continues to engage regularly with the culture secretary, as part of our ongoing efforts to support the UK's high quality children's content creators'. But while she and others work on that, what are parents to do? Ban our kids from accessing YouTube? Co-watch at all times? Neither seems realistic, at least not in my household. I have promised we will continue to apply a little more of that all-important intentionality. 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