Review: Black Sabbath LG Arena, Birmingham
It's Christmas, so it must be panto time. And heavy metal music has no greater panto villain and hero rolled into one than Black Sabbath frontman Ozzy Osbourne.
"I won't be drinking this Christmas," the Brummie singer told Sabbath's packed-out homecoming crowd before deadpanning "I got busted earlier this year", referring to marital problems back home after he famously fell off the wagon in 2013.
Touring to promote '13', their first Ozzy-fronted album in 35-years which rocketed straight to number one, this was a band standing loud and proud in the face of guitarist Tony Iommi's ongoing cancer treatment and the fallout and legal shenanigans which saw original drummer Bill Ward excluded from the tour.
But with Ozzy, Iommi and bassist Geezer Butler on the stage, this was still three-quarters of the band that invented heavy metal itself in this very city 45 years ago.
It was a moment not lost on the crowd who roared their appreciation as the lights went down, sirens wailed and the band crashed into opener War Pigs.
For the next two hours Sabbath pounded their way through 16 tracks, 12 of which were originally recorded between 1970 and 1972, and three, from '13' which sounded exactly like they'd also been written then.
It was genuinely a welcome sight to see Iommi looking well, relaxed and clearly delighted to be playing his home city, his guitar playing cutting and incisive, balanced perfectly by Butler's frenetic bass. On classics like Iron Man, NIB and a fabulous Into The Void, the two interlocked into an irresistible doom-laden wall of sound.
On the new songs; Age of Reason, End of the Beginning and God Is Dead?, it was clear their musical understanding hasn't deserted them.
Drummer Tommy Clufetos did a good job standing in for Ward throughout, although awarding him a seven-minute solo spot was maybe a little too retro, although a good proportion of the crowd cheered their approval.
As for Ozzy, he played the clown as only he can, drenching a couple of security guards with buckets of water, shuffling around the stage as he got the crowd clapping along and indulging in stage banter that was generally a variation on "let's see your ******* hands" and "I can't ******* hear you!"
That famous wailing voice was often hopelessly out of tune and occasionally appeared to be in a totally different time signature to the rest of the band – particularly apparent during the song Black Sabbath itself - but Ozzy is a true one-off and such a legend that he's clearly completely forgiven by the band's legion of fans.
"Shall we come back and do it again?" he asked as Iommi played a few bars from Sabbath Bloody Sabbath before his fingers rose inexorably up the fretboard and the famous riff to Paranoid pounded out. Cue mad headbanging from the crowd, cue confetti cannons, cue a deluge of huge black balloons.
By Ian Harvey
