Billy Corgan Reflects on Black Sabbath's Final Show: ‘We Have Them in Our Hearts'
The all-day show at Villa Park saw Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward reunite for the first time since 2005. Corgan joined the festivities as part of a 'supergroup' alongside Steven Tyler, Sammy Hagar, Tool's Adam Jones, and Tom Morello to perform covers of Judas Priest's 'Breaking the Law' and Black Sabbath's 'Snowblind.'
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'I first heard Black Sabbath on my uncle's stereo some 50 years ago,' Corgan shared on Instagram. 'So it was surreal to stand on a football pitch with 45,000 strong to witness the end of this grand, institutional group who has touched me personally, professionally, and at times even intimately in stolen moments of work and camaraderie. Thank you Tony, Bill, Geezer, and Ozzy for all you've done for so many.'
He continued, 'I owe a debt of gratitude to Sharon [Osbourne] for asking me to take part. It was truly an honor on more levels that I could count. And to witness the passionate performances of so many in rehearsal: those I admire from afar, those I know, too, and see the translation into the near 10-hour affair of music and fellowship was something to behold. Music is of course the soundtrack to our lives, but yesterday in my estimation was something truly special. As a 3-dimensional soundtrack was being crafted in real time. All to celebrate this coming home for the band once known as Earth.'
Corgan added that 'every great journey has trials and tribulations, tragedies and surprise.' 'Therein lies the magic, therein lie the tears,' he wrote. 'I both whooped yesterday in sheer exultation to be in the right spot at the right moment, and I wept silently as my heroes fell on their wizardly, mythic sword to bid us farewell. We have the music, and we have them in our hearts. You don't have to be a musician to understand. But it does help, at least if you're trying to decode that which is elusive in the cosmos. Now the band is both here and not here; with us, and yet gone. As it should be.'
Osbourne's all-star farewell concert on Saturday, dubbed Back to the Beginning, featured numerous bands besides Black Sabbath, including Metallica and Guns N' Roses, who both paid tribute to the ailing musician. Metallica kicked off their set by covering Black Sabbath's 'Hole in the Sky' from 1975's Sabotage and they also covered 'Johnny Blade' from 1978's Never Say Die!. Guns N' Roses performed four Black Sabbath renditions, including opening with Technical Ecstasy's 'It's Alright' before launching into 'Never Say Die.'
'It's my time to go back to the beginning … time for me to give back to the place where I was born,' Osbourne said of the concert in a statement back in February. 'How blessed am I to do it with the help of people whom I love. Birmingham is the true home of metal. Birmingham for ever.'
A new documentary, No Escape From Now, will chronicle the monumental health setbacks Osbourne has experienced since 2019 and how he came to the decision to set up the farewell concert in his hometown. The film will premiere on Paramount+ later this year.
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‘Generations of women have been disfigured': Jamie Lee Curtis lets rip on plastic surgery, power, and Hollywood's age problem
I'm scheduled to speak to Jamie Lee Curtis at 2pm UK time, and a few minutes before the allotted slot I dial in via video link, to be met with a vision of the 66-year-old actor sitting alone in a darkened room, staring impassively into the camera. 'Morning,' she says, with comic flatness, as I make a sound of surprise that is definitely not a little scream. Oh, hi!! I say, Are you early or am I late? 'I'm always early,' says the actor, deadpan. 'Or as my elder daughter refers to me, 'aggressively early'.' Curtis is in a plain black top, heavy black-framed glasses and – importantly for this conversation – little or no makeup, while behind her in the gloom, a dog sleeps in a basket. She won't say what part of the US she's in beyond the fact it's a 'witness protection cabin in the woods' where 'I'm trying to have privacy' – an arch way, I assume, of saying she's not in LA – and immediately starts itemising other situations in which she has been known to be early: Hollywood premieres ('They tell me I can't go to the red carpet yet because it's not open and so my driver, Cal, and I drive around and park in the shade'); early-morning text messages ('I wake people up'); even her work schedule: 'I show up, do the work, and then I get the fuck out.' This is the short version; in full, the opening minutes of our conversation involve Curtis free-associating through references to the memory of her mother and stepfather missing her performance in a school musical in Connecticut; the negotiating aims of the makeup artists' union; the nickname by which she would like to be known if she ever becomes a grandmother ('Fifo' – short for 'first in first out'); and what, exactly, her earliness is about. Not, as you might imagine, anxiety, but: 'You know, honestly, I've done enough analysis of all this – it's control.' Curtis knows her early arrivals strike some people as rude. 'My daughter Annie says: 'People aren't ready for you.' And I basically say: 'Well, that's their problem. They should be ready.'' 'That's their problem' is, along with, 'I don't give a shit any more' a classic Curtis expression that goes a long way towards explaining why so many people love her – and they really do love her – a woman who on top of charming us for decades in a clutch of iconic roles, has crossed over, lately, into that paradoxical territory in which she is loved precisely because she's done worrying about what others think of her. Specifically, she doesn't care about the orthodoxies of an industry in which women are shamed into having cosmetic surgery before they hit 30. Curtis has spoken of having a procedure herself at 25, following a comment made on the set of a film that her eyes were 'baggy'. Regretting it, she has in the years since made the genuinely outlandish and inspiring decision to wear her hair grey and eschew surgical tweaks. That Curtis is the child of two Hollywood icons, Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, and thus an insider since birth, either makes this more surprising or else explains it entirely, but either way, she has become someone who appears to operate outside the usual Hollywood rules. 'I have become quite brusque,' says Curtis, of people making demands on her time when she's not open for business. 'And I have no problem saying: 'Back the fuck off.'' I have become quite brusque, and I have no problem saying: Back off! I can believe it. During the course of our conversation, Curtis's attitude – which is broadly charming, occasionally hectoring and appears to be driven by a general and sardonic belligerence – is that of someone pushing back against a lifetime of misconceptions, from which, four months shy of her 67th birthday, she finally feels herself to be free. Curtis is in a glorious phase of her career, one that, despite starring in huge hits – from the Halloween franchise and A Fish Called Wanda (1988) to Trading Places (1983), True Lies (1994) and the superlative Knives Out (2019) – has always eluded her. The fact is, celebrity aside, Curtis has never been considered a particularly heavyweight actor or been A-list in the conventional way. At its most trivial, this has required her to weather small slights, such as being ignored by the Women In Film community, with its tedious schedule of panels and events. ('I still exist outside of Women In Film,' she snaps. 'They're not asking me to their lunch.') And, more broadly, has seen Curtis completely overlooked by the Oscars since she shot Halloween, her first movie, at the age of 19. Well, all that has changed now. In 2023, Curtis won an Oscar for best supporting actress for her role as Deirdre Beaubeirdre in the genre-bending movie Everything Everywhere All at Once. That same year, she appeared in a single episode of the multi-award-winning TV show The Bear as Donna Berzatto, the alcoholic mother of a large Italian clan – she calls it 'the most exhilarating creative experience I will ever have'. Anyone who saw this extraordinary performance is still talking about it, and it led to a larger role on the show. Doors that had always been shut to Curtis flew open. For years, she had tried and failed to get movie and TV projects off the ground. Now, she lists the forthcoming projects she had a hand in bringing to the screen: 'Freakier Friday, TV series Scarpetta, survival movie The Lost Bus, four other TV shows and two other movies.' She has become a 'prolific producer', she says, as well as a Hollywood elder and role model. All of which makes Curtis laugh – the fact that, finally, 'at 66, I get to be a boss'. You'd better believe she'll be making the most of it. * * * The movie Curtis and I are ostensibly here to talk about is Freakier Friday, the follow-up to Freaky Friday, the monster Disney hit of 2003 in which Curtis and Lindsay Lohan appeared as a mother and daughter who switch bodies with hilarious consequences. I defy anyone who enjoyed the first film not to feel both infinitely aged by revisiting the cast more than 20 years on, and also not to find it a wildly enjoyable return. The teenage Lohan of the first movie is now a 37-year-old mother of 15-year-old Harper, played by Julia Butters, while the introduction of a second teenager – Harper's mortal enemy Lily, played by Sophia Hammons – allows for a four-way body swap in which Curtis-as-grandma is inhabited by Hammons' British wannabe influencer. If it lacks the simplicity of the first movie, I thoroughly enjoyed it and look forward to taking my 10-year-old girls when it opens next month. I witnessed my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their life and their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age It is also a movie that presented Curtis with an odd set of challenges. She has a problem with 'pretty'. When Curtis herself was a teenager, she says, she was 'cute but not pretty'. She watched both her parents' careers atrophy after their youthful good looks started to wane. Part of her shtick around earliness is an almost existential refusal to live on Hollywood's timeline, because, she says: 'I witnessed my parents lose the very thing that gave them their fame and their life and their livelihood, when the industry rejected them at a certain age. I watched them reach incredible success and then have it slowly erode to where it was gone. And that's very painful.' As a result, says Curtis: 'I have been self-retiring for 30 years. I have been prepping to get out, so that I don't have to suffer the same as my family did. I want to leave the party before I'm no longer invited.' In the movie, Curtis was allowed to keep her grey hair (although it looks shot through with blond) but her trademark pixie cut was replaced with something longer and softer. I take it with a pinch when she says things such as, 'I'm an old lady' and, 'I'm going to die soon' – even in age-hating Hollywood, this seems overegged – but one takes the point that she found the conventional aesthetic demands of Freakier Friday, in which she 'had to look pretty, I had to pay attention to [flattering] lighting, and clothes and hair and makeup and nails', much harder than playing a dishevelled alcoholic in The Bear. On the other hand, Curtis is a pro and, of course, gave Disney the full-throated, zany-but-still-kinda-hot grandma they wanted. (There is a scene in which she tries to explain various board games – Boggle, Parcheesi – to the owl-eyed teens that reminds you just how fine a comic actor she is.) It's the story of how Freakier Friday came about, however, that really gives insight into who Curtis is: an absolute, indefatigable and inveterate hustler. 'I am owning my hustle, now,' she says and is at her most impressive, her most charming and energised when she is talking about the hustle. To wit: Curtis was on a world tour promoting the Halloween franchise that made her name and that enjoyed a hugely successful reboot in 2018, when something about the crowd response struck her. 'In every single city I went to, the only movie they asked me about besides Halloween was Freaky Friday – was there going to be a sequel?' When she got back from the tour, she called Bob Iger, Disney's CEO. 'I said: 'Look, I don't know if you're planning on doing [a sequel], but Lindsay is old enough to have a teenager now, and I'm telling you the market for that movie exists.'' As the project came together, Curtis learned that Disney was planning to release Freakier Friday straight to streaming. 'And I called Bob Iger' – it's at this point you start to imagine Iger seeing Curtis's name flash up on his phone and experiencing a slight drop in spirits – 'and I called David Greenbaum [Disney Live Action president], and I called Asad Ayaz, who's the head of marketing, and I said: 'Guys, I have one word for you: Barbie. If you don't think the audience that saw Barbie is going to be the audience that goes and sees Freakier Friday, you're wrong.'' This is what Curtis means when she refers to herself as 'a marketing person', or 'a weapon of mass promotion', and she has done it for ever. It's what she did in 2002 when she lobbied More magazine to let her pose in her underwear and no makeup – 'They didn't come to me and say: 'Hey Jamie, how about you take off your clothes and show America that you're chubby?' The More magazine thing happened because I said it should happen, and I even titled the piece: True Thighs.' And it is what she was doing a few weeks before our interview when she turned up to the photoshoot in LA bearing a bunch of props she had ordered from Amazon, including oversized plastic lips and a blond wig. Curtis says: 'There are many, many actresses who love the dress up, who love clothes, who love fashion, who love being a model. I. Hate. It. I feel like I am having to wrestle with your idea of me versus my idea of me. Because I've worked hard to establish who I am, and I don't want you to … I have struggled with it my whole life.' Curtis is emphatic that her ideas be accurately interpreted and, before our meeting, sent an email via her publicist explaining her thinking behind the shoot. 'The wax lips is my statement against plastic surgery. I've been very vocal about the genocide of a generation of women by the cosmeceutical industrial complex, who've disfigured themselves. The wax lips really sends it home.' Obviously, the word 'genocide' is very strong and risks causing offence, given its proper meaning. To Curtis, however, it is accurate. 'I've used that word for a long time and I use it specifically because it's a strong word. I believe that we have wiped out a generation or two of natural human [appearance]. The concept that you can alter the way you look through chemicals, surgical procedures, fillers – there's a disfigurement of generations of predominantly women who are altering their appearances. And it is aided and abetted by AI, because now the filter face is what people want. I'm not filtered right now. The minute I lay a filter on and you see the before and after, it's hard not to go: 'Oh, well that looks better.' But what's better? Better is fake. And there are too many examples – I will not name them – but very recently we have had a big onslaught through media, many of those people.' Well, at the risk of sounding harsh, one of the people implicated by Curtis's criticism is Lindsay Lohan, her Freakier Friday co-star and a woman in her late 30s who has seemingly had a lot of cosmetic procedures at a startlingly young age (though Lohan denies having had surgery). In terms of mentoring Lohan, with whom Curtis remained friends after making the first film, she says: 'I'm bossy, very bossy, but I try to mind my own business. She doesn't need my advice. She's a fully functioning, smart woman, creative person. Privately, she's asked me questions, but nothing that's more than an older friend you might ask.' But given the stridency of Curtis's position on cosmetic surgery, don't younger women feel judged in her presence? Isn't it awkward? 'No. No. Because I don't care. It doesn't matter. I'm not proselytising to them. I would never say a word. I would never say to someone: what have you done? All I know is that it is a never-ending cycle. That, I know. Once you start, you can't stop. But it's not my job to give my opinion; it's none of my business.' As for Lohan, Curtis says: 'I felt tremendous maternal care for Lindsay after the first movie, and continued to feel that. When she'd come to LA, I would see her. She and I have remained friends, and now we're sort of colleagues. I feel less maternal towards her because she's a mommy now herself and doesn't need my maternal care, and has, obviously, a mom – Dina's a terrific grandma.' The general point about the horror of trying to stay young via surgery is sensible and, of course, I agree. At the back of my mind, however, I have a small, pinging reservation that I can't quite put my finger on. I suggest to Curtis that she has natural advantages by virtue of being a movie star, which, on the one hand, of course, makes her more vulnerable around issues of ageing, but on the other hand, she's naturally beautiful and everyone loves her, and most average women who – 'I have short grey hair!' she protests. 'Other women can –' They can, of course! But you must have a physical confidence that falls outside the normal – 'No! No!' She won't have it. 'I feel like you're trying to say: 'You're in some rarefied air, Jamie.'' I'm not! She responds: 'By the way, genetics – you can't fuck with genetics. You want to know where my genetics lie?' She lifts up an arm and wobbles her bingo wings at me. 'Are you kidding me? By the way, you're not going to see a picture of me in a tank top, ever.' This is Curtis's red line. 'I wear long-sleeve shirts; that's just common sense.' She gives me a beady look. 'I challenge you that I'm in some rarefied air.' I think about this afterwards to try and clarify my objection, which I guess is this: that the main reason women in middle age dye their hair is to stave off invisibility, which, with the greatest respect, is not among the veteran movie star's problems. But it's a minor quibble given what I genuinely believe is Curtis's helpful and iconoclastic gesture. And when she talks about cosmetic surgery as addiction, she should know. Curtis was an alcoholic until she got sober at 40 and is emphatic and impressive on this subject, the current poster woman – literally: she's on signs across LA for an addiction charity with the tagline: 'My bravest thing? Getting sober'. I'm curious about how her intense need for control worked, in those years long ago, alongside her addiction? 'I am a controlled addict,' she says. 'In recovery we talk about how, in order to start recovering, you have to hit what you call a 'bottom'. You have to crash and burn, lose yourself and your family and your job and your resources in order to know that the way you were living didn't work. I refer to myself as an Everest bottom; I am the highest bottom I know. When I acknowledged my lack of control, I was in a very controlled state. I lost none of the external aspects of my life. The only thing I had lost was my own sense of myself and self-esteem.' Externally, during those years of addiction, she seemed to be doing very well. Her career boomed. She married Christopher Guest, the actor, screenwriter and director, and they have two children and have stayed married for more than 40 years. (There's no miracle to this. As Curtis puts it, wryly: 'It's just that we have chosen to stay married. And be married people. And we love each other. And I believe we respect each other. And I'm sure there's a little bit of hatred in there, too.') I wonder, then, whether Curtis's success during those years disguised how serious a situation she was in with her addiction? 'There's no one way to be an addict or an alcoholic. People hide things – I was lucky, and I am ambitious, and so I never let that self-medication get in the way of my ambition or work or creativity. It never bled through. No one would ever have said that had been an issue for me.' Where was the cost? 'The external costs are awful for people; but the internal costs are more sinister and deadly, because to understand that you are powerless over something other than your own mind and creativity is something. But that was a long time ago. I'm an old lady now.' She is doing better than ever. With the Oscar under her belt, Curtis has just returned in the new season of The Bear and has a slew of projects – many developed with Jason Blum, the veteran horror producer with whom she has a development deal – coming down the line. Watching her bravura performance as Donna Berzatto, I did wonder if playing an alcoholic had been in any way traumatic. She flashes me a look of pure vehemence. 'Here's what's traumatic: not being able to express your range as an artist. That's traumatic. To spend your entire public life holding back range. And depth. And complexity. And contradiction. And rage. And pain. And sorrow.' She builds momentum: 'And to have been limited to a much smaller palette of creative, emotional work. 'For me, it was an unleashing of 50 years of being a performer who was never considered to have any range. And so the freedom, and the confidence, that I was given by Chris [Storer, the show's creator], and the writing, which leads you … everywhere you need to go – it was exhilarating.' She continues: 'It took no toll. The toll has been 40 years of holding back something I know is here.' Well, there she is, the Curtis who thrills and inspires. Among the many new projects is The Lost Bus, a survival disaster movie for AppleTV+ about a bus full of children trying to escape wildfires. The idea came to Curtis while she was driving on the freeway, listening to an NPR report on the deadly wildfires of 2018 in the small town of Paradise, California. She pulled over and called Blum; the movie, directed by Paul Greengrass and starring Matthew McConaughey and America Ferrera, drops later this year. For another project, she managed to persuade Patricia Cornwell, the superstar thriller writer, to release the rights for her Scarpetta series, which, as well as producing, Curtis will star in alongside Nicole Kidman. This burst of activity is something Curtis ascribes to the 'freedom' she derived from losing 'all vanity', and over the course of our conversation 'freedom' is the word she most frequently uses to describe what she values in life. Freedom is a particularly loaded and precious concept for those on the other side of addiction and, says Curtis, 'I have dead relatives; I have parents who both had issues with drinking and drugs. I have a dead sibling. I have numerous friends who never found the freedom, which is really the goal – right? Freedom.' It's a principle that also extends to her family. Curtis's daughter Ruby, 29, is trans, and I ask how insulated they are from Donald Trump's aggressively anti-trans policies. 'I want to be careful because I protect my family,' says Curtis. 'I'm an outspoken advocate for the right of human beings to be who they are. And if a governmental organisation tries to claim they're not allowed to be who they are, I will fight against that. I'm a John Steinbeck student – he's my favourite writer – and there's a beautiful piece of writing from East of Eden about the freedom of people to be who they are. Any government, religion, institution trying to limit that freedom is what I need to fight against.' There are many, many other subjects to cycle through, including Curtis's friendship with Mariska Hargitay, whose new documentary about her mother, Jayne Mansfield, hit Curtis particularly hard, not least because 'Jayne's house was next to Tony Curtis's house – that big pink house on Carolwood Drive that Tony Curtis lived in and Sonny and Cher owned prior to him.' (I don't know if referring to her dad as 'Tony Curtis,' is intended to charm, but it does.) There's also a school reunion she went to over a decade ago; the feeling she has of being 'a 14-year-old energy bunny'; the fact we've been pronouncing 'Everest' wrong all this time; the role played by lyrics from Justin Timberlake's Like I Love You in her friendship with Lindsay Lohan; and the 'Gordian knot' of what happens when not being a brand becomes your brand. Curtis could, one suspects, summon an infinite stream of enthusiasms and – perhaps no better advertisement for ageing, this – share urgent thoughts about every last one of them. In an industry in which people weigh their words, veil their opinions and pander to every passing ideal, she has gone in a different direction, one unrestrained by the usual timidities. Or as she puts it with her typical take-it-or-leave-it flatness, 'the freedom to have my own mind, wherever it's going to take me. I'm comfortable with that journey and reject the rest.' • Freakier Friday is in Australian cinemas from 7 August and from 8 August in the UK and US • Jamie Lee Curtis wears: (leopard look) jacket and skirt, by Rixo; T-shirt and belt, both by AllSaints; boots, by Dr Martens; tights, by Wolford; (tartan look) suit, by Vivienne Westwood, from tights, by Wolford; shoes, by By Far. Fashion stylist: Avigail Collins at Forward Artists. Set stylist: Stefania Lucchesi at Saint Luke Artists. Hair: Sean James at Aim Artists. Makeup: Erin Ayanian Monroe at Cloutier Remix.
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'Black Sabbath loved Workington and we loved them'
Not many music fans can say they have met their idol, let alone have sung with them on a stage in front of thousands. Yet one Ozzy Osbourne superfan has. It's that memory a Cumbrian man says will stay with him for the rest of his life, as he marks the death of the Prince of Darkness. For 48 years, Des Rumney has been captivated by Ozzy and his heavy metal band Black Sabbath, rocking out to 90 concerts. And it's no surprise - Mr Rumney's home town of Workington was, after all, the birthplace of Black Sabbath. "Ozzy was no stranger to Cumbria," Mr Rumney, 60, said. "Black Sabbath and Workington go hand-in-hand. "People from Workington who are into their rock music scene, they all know about the Black Sabbath past with Workington, and there's a lot of people who still remember it, who were there." There is even a plaque to prove it, placed at the town's Carnegie Theatre after Mr Rumney and his band fundraised to mark the Black Sabbath Cumbrian connection. The people of Workington watched history being made on 26 August 1969, when a band called Earth played at Banklands Youth Club. Formed in Birmingham, Earth featured Tony Iommi on guitar, Bill Ward on drums, Geezer Butler on bass and Ozzy Osbourne on vocals. The band were touring across Cumbria, also playing in Silloth, Carlisle, Low Hesket and Wigton. And after a successful tour in Germany, the band had decided to change their name to Black Sabbath, announcing it to the excited crowd that had packed out Banklands. When Ozzy and Butler wrote the lyrics for a song called Black Sabbath, inspired by the horror film of the same name, it pushed the band in a darker musical direction. This genre did not sit well with everyone in Cumbria in the weeks running up to their famous name change at the Workington gig. Music promoter Andy Park had booked Earth across 20 venues, but can remember one particular night at Low Hesket Village Hall, in Carlisle, for all the wrong reasons. He told BBC Radio Cumbria: "They died an absolute death and all I can remember is the caretaker kept coming into the hall looking for me and he came across to me and his words were so simple - 'it's a dance, make them dance'. "So he expected me to get 150 people up on the dance floor." Mr Park said the crowd at the village hall were more used to country dances. "I cringe at that it even now," he added. But it was a different story at other venues across Carlisle and Workington. Mr Rumney said he was studying at Workington Technical College when the band last played in the town on 13 February 1970, the day the self-titled debut album Black Sabbath was released. "Ozzy himself came back to Cumbria on numerous occasions, the last time I can remember him being around this area was in 1980 at the Matador," he said. One night at that Workington hotel, he claimed, Ozzy told the landlord "if you don't keep the bar open, I'm going to buy the pub". "He was a larger-than-life character," Mr Rumney added. "He wasn't one of these stuck-up rock was about being with the fans, he was just a normal, working-class bloke." Ozzy's eagerness to connect with his fans was proven to Mr Rumney over the many times he saw him perform as a solo artist. "Ozzy was always welcoming people coming on stage at his gigs and having a party," he said. "The best time was when I got up on stage at Donington, that was something special." After being fired from Black Sabbath, Ozzy played Donington's Monsters of Rock festival in Leicestershire several times, in 1984, 1986 and in 1996. It was during the 1984 performance Mr Rumney got his moment of fame. "I managed to get onto the stage and I can remember looking out over the crowd, Ozzy with his arm around us just looking at over the was just a fantastic moment in my life. "There has been a couple of embarrassing times when I've been on stage when he gave us a microphone and I sung right out of tune for Bark at the Moon." Mr Rumney, who plays in a band called Zero, said Black Sabbath had been a "big part" of his life since he was 12. He and his bandmates paid tribute to the momentous day Earth became Black Sabbath with a blue plaque in Workington in 2022. The unofficial blue plaque, which Mr Rumney and his bandmates fundraised for, sits on the walls of Carnegie Theatre, as the Banklands Youth Club site now houses a school. "I wanted the plaque so people recognise that such a big band loved this area. "They loved Workington and we loved them." Follow BBC Cumbria on X, Facebook, Nextdoor and Instagram. More on this story Wild life of Ozzy Osbourne, rock's 'prince of darkness' 'There won't be another like him': Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath bandmates pay tribute How Black Sabbath found their sound - and invented heavy metal Flowers, beer bottles and an orchestra - fans pay respects to Ozzy
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Film festival returns with global cinema line-up
Warwickshire's Big Picture Film Festival returns to Stratford-upon-Avon this summer for a weekend of international cinema. Organised by Live & Local, this year's festival takes place from 28-31 August with the theme of connection and disruption. The festival, which is supported by Stratford Town Trust, will open with a screening of David Attenborough's latest documentary, Ocean with David Attenborough, after organisers partnered with local environmental groups Stratford Net Zero and River Hope. Live & Local said the line-up included an array of cinema, from classics to modern independents, from live music scores to documentaries and animated works. This year, the festival will be based at The Bear Pit Theatre every day, with additional events taking place at Holy Trinity Parish Centre and Stratford Youth Hub, as well as several fringe events in Warwickshire yet to be announced. What's being shown during the festival? The varied line-up includes a screening of the oldest surviving animated feature film in the world, Lotte Reiniger's The Adventures of Prince Achmed (1926), which will be accompanied by a band playing the original music for the film. Another classic being shown is Toshio Matsumoto's debut feature Funeral Parade of Roses (1969), hailed by the British Film Institute as a "landmark of Japanese queer cinema". Stratford-based refugee charity Welcome Here is partnering with Stratford Amnesty International Group to present a screening of the Iranian/Scottish co-production, Winners (2022) - a film set in a small Iranian town as two children find a lost academy award. Also on the line-up is Thelma (2024), featuring 94-year-old June Squibb playing a woman seeking vengeance after being scammed out of $10,000. Local groups Stratford Net Zero, Welcome Here, River Hope and Stratford Amnesty are also presenting a screening of the 2024 Oscar-winning animated film Flow, which follows a black cat in a flooded world, joining other displaced animals on a journey of survival and co-operation. Are other events taking place? Several Q&A sessions will also take place as part of the festival. Stratford-based Bafta winning duo The Brothers McLeod will lead a discussion about the life and death of ideas, called False Starts and Surprises. The festival also welcomes Bafta breakthrough filmmaker Ella Glendining and international award-winning director Gordon Main for Q&A screenings of their documentaries. Ella Glendining's Is There Anybody Out There? (2023) presents a first-hand account of living with disability. Gordon Main's London Recruits (2024), tells the story of the undercover anti-racism missions carried out by ordinary Londoners during the South African apartheid. Screenwriter Geoff Thompson, director Michael B. Clifford and producer Natasha Carlish - all from Warwickshire - will also do a Q&A event about their trilogy of three short films, filmed across two decades, including Bouncer, which starred Ray Winstone and Paddy Considine, and Brown Paper Bag, which won a Bafta. Alongside the main festival, there will also be an awards ceremony and Q&A screening of this year's short film competition winners. How much do tickets cost? The festival has maintained its pay-as-you-feel box office, with organisers saying this meant there was "no financial barrier to attend". Chris Davis from Live & Local said: "We are extremely grateful for the support of Stratford Town Trust, which has allowed us to bring our film festival back to the town and also helps to make the festival more accessible to audiences. "We have some great events lined up and we encourage audiences to come along and enjoy, whatever their budget." Follow BBC Coventry & Warwickshire on BBC Sounds, Facebook, X and Instagram. Related internet links Live & Local Big Picture Film Festival
