The founding fathers of metal have confirmed that they have reached the end of the road. Here’s nearly 50 years of one of rock’s greatest bands, in photographs
Main image: Sabbath, Bloody Sabbath … Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne Photograph: Chris Walter/WireImage
Thu 9 Mar 2017 11.31 EST Last modified on Tue 25 Jun 2019 11.59 EDT
Ozzy Osbourne pictured backstage in 1971. He said of Sabbath’s early commercial success: ““At one time I just wanted to get a record in the charts and when we did it was amazing. It’s not changed any of us, we just want to go on playing good music and making people happy”
Bassist Geezer Butler was Sabbath’s main lyricist, and always insisted – despite accusations – that he was not trying to promote satanism. “I was brought up an incredibly strict Catholic, and believed in hell and the devil. But though I’d been taught about God and Jesus, no-one ever went into what the devil was all about, so when I was 16 or 17, I went about trying to find out. And because I wrote most of Black Sabbath’s lyrics, some of that ended up in the songs,” he said in 1994
Ozzy Osbourne expressed Sabbath’s worldview in one 1972 interview: “This love trip is so grossly distorted. One week you fall in love, the next week you fall out and start doing dope and blow your mind out. I don’t believe there’s anyone in this world who is 100% in love. I don’t think anyone is totally happy; you can’t really wake up in the morning free of hassles and do what you want as long as you don’t harm anybody else”
Black Sabbath in the mid-1970s. Guitarist Tony Iommi said in 1973: “I’m basically a shy person and I don’t like meeting people. I prefer to stay in and watch television or play Monopoly. I suppose most people might think it’s a boring way to live but I prefer simple things and I’ve done my raving”
Iommi and Osbourne on stage with Sabbath in their heyday. “It is plain enough that if Osborne in his high, starred boots had ordered his audience in the circle to leap from the balcony, they would have done that too without hesitation,” wrote one reviewer in 1972
Though Osbourne had been out of Sabbath for five years, he reunited with his bandmates for the Philadelphia leg of Live Aid in 1985. “I had a dreadful hangover,” Iommi wrote in his autobiography. “So I put my dark glasses on and we played Children of the Grave, Iron Man and Paranoid in the bright sunlight. It was a great thing to do and we certainly we aware of the importance of the occasion, but it was over very quickly”
Ozzy Osbourne on stage with Black Sabbath. In their early days, the band were routinely dismissed by critics: ““I’ve been worried something like this was going to happen since the first time I saw a numerology column in an underground newspaper,” wrote Robert Christgau
In 1998, the original lineup released the live album Reunion, recorded at home-town shows in Birmingham in 1997. Iron Man was released as a single from Reunion, and won Sabbath their first Grammy – they took the best metal performance award at the 2000 Grammys ceremony
