Dougie Wallace for NBC News Music Ozzy Osbourne's last stand With tears in his makeup-shadowed eyes, Osbourne, the ailing and retiring frontman for Black Sabbath, raged against the twilight of the metal gods.

NBC News

16 hours ago

July 6, 2025, 10:35 AM EDT
By Alexander Smith
BIRMINGHAM, England — Ozzy Osbourne rises from beneath the stage on a leather throne adorned with a bat and two diamond-eyed skulls. It's part rock 'n' roll theater, part medical necessity. At 76, the 'Prince of Darkness' has Parkinson's disease, his spine is held together with screws and plates, and his ailing voice sometimes struggles for pitch.
But this was an emotional display of bloody-minded defiance.
On Saturday night, in his hometown of Birmingham, Osbourne forced his battered body through the final concert of his band, Black Sabbath, the godfathers of heavy metal formed in 1968. It capped a 10-hour marathon featuring the biggest names in hard rock, from Metallica and Guns N'Roses to supergroups packed with A-listers from Aerosmith, Rage Against the Machine, the Smashing Pumpkins and even Ronnie Wood from the Rolling Stones.
With some 45,000 coming from all over the world to fill Birmingham's Villa Park soccer stadium — and another 5.8 million watching online — it was a defining moment for an epoch now in its twilight. The superstars of 1960s and '70s counterculture are bowing out, often replaced by the fragmented niches, tribes and trends enabled by the internet. With tears in his makeup-shadowed eyes, the Sabbath frontman both honored this handover while raging against the dying of its light.
'You've got no idea how I feel. Thank you from the bottom of my heart,' Osbourne told the rapt audience in a faltering voice.
The snap reviews were replete with awe.
'I was a bit afraid when I first saw Ozzy in his chair; I didn't know how he was going to be,' said Markus Kocher, 57, who traveled here from Stuttgart, Germany, where he works in manufacturing. 'But it was fantastic. I was very, very emotional. I was born in 1968, so Black Sabbath has been around me my whole life.'
Hints abound that many rockers here are no longer in their 1970s prime. A sign outside the stadium warns 'crowd-surfing and moshing are not advised,' and an MC tells the audience to 'make sure you're hydrated — not just with beer!' But there are also plenty in the masses born decades after Sabbath's heyday, including a notable number of families.
'I cried,' said Heyang Zhou, a 21-year-old student from Huangshan, China, who is studying in Liverpool, England. 'Ozzy is so ill but he still made a show for us.'
The entertainment is male-dominated (of the dozens of musicians there is only one woman: Lzzy Hale of Pennsylvania rockers Halestorm) but the crowd is far from it.
'I paid about 400 British pounds (about $550) for the ticket, but I would have paid 1,000 pounds — honestly even more than that,' said Maddison Wilson, 28, from Cleveland, Ohio. 'This is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I was brought up by my parents with older music, whether it's Black Sabbath or Pink Floyd. Great music is great music.'
It was fitting that a career of drug binges, reality-TV stardom — and wild behavior such as Osbourne biting the head off a bat — ended a stone's throw from where the band grew up in the deprived Birmingham neighborhood of Aston. Masterminded by Osbourne's promoter and wife, Sharon Osbourne, and Rage Against the Machine guitarist Tom Morello, acting as musical director, the event will see proceeds go to the British charity Cure Parkinson's and the local Birmingham Children's Hospital and Acorns Children's Hospice.
That homecoming ethos inspired the event's name 'Back to the Beginning,' the first time in more than 20 years that Sabbath has performed with its original 1968 lineup: guitarist Tony Iommi, 77, Geezer Butler, 75, on bass, drummer Bill Ward, who at age 77 finished his set shirtless.
Yes, they only made it through four numbers — 'War Pigs,' 'NIB,' 'Iron Man' and 'Paranoid' — but those songs contained some of the most bludgeoning, earth-rending guitar riffs ever conceived. Though wavering at times, Osbourne's 'Brummie' vocals were unmistakable. And lacing it all were the doom-laden occult themes that caused such a moral panic at the time but influenced generations of metalheads thereafter.
A measure of Sabbath's influence is how other artists have clamored to be at this whistle-stop extravaganza emceed by Hollywood actor Jason Momoa. At one point, sharing the stage were Rolling Stones legend Ronnie Wood, Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler and Blink-182 drummer Travis Barker — before Red Hot Chili Peppers' sticksman Chad Smith took his place.
'Without Black Sabbath, there would be no Metallica,' the latter's frontman, James Hetfield, a relative spring chicken at age 61, told the crowd during that band's thundering set. 'Thank you, boys, for giving us a purpose in life.'
Every act — which on another night would be headliners in their own right — played at least one cover song from Black Sabbath's catalog or Osbourne's solo career.
'It felt great to be part of this tribute,' Wood told NBC News moments after stepping offstage. 'It's a great day. Good old Ozzy,' he added affectionately.
For fans, many spent thousands of dollars, pounds, euros, pesos and dinars to make global pilgrimages. They seem almost offended at the suggestion they could miss it.
There's Tim Mullholem, 64, a chiropractor from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, who paid $20,000 — including VIP, stageside tickets at $5,000 a piece — because 'we needed to be here' to see his childhood heroes.
Thiago Salay, 40, from Sao Paulo, Brazil, had his first IRL meeting with Sandra Perez, 43, from Los Angeles, two devotees from an online fan club who had known each other virtually for 20 years. 'I sat at the computer for, like, days and days and days trying to get tickets,' said Perez.
Isaac Gindi, 50, was almost thwarted by the conflict between his homeland of Israel and Iran, wasting thousands on nonrefundable flights grounded by rocket fire. He doesn't care: 'Music is the best thing we have in life. I believe it will change the world.'
And why not, when nights like these are an increasing rarity.
Whereas audiences once consumed a relative monoculture fed by TV, radio and the press, the internet has fragmented us into a million musical silos. Add to that the collapse of record sales and the rise of streaming, and it's almost impossible for most acts to make any money.
'Audiences today are much more fragmented,' said Keith Kahn-Harris, a sociologist and music critic who teaches in the department of psycho-social studies at London's Birkbeck College. 'It's not an era in which you have that kind of mass audience' common among their midcentury forebears.
There are exceptions — Taylor Swift and Beyoncé often seem ubiquitous — but these are 'more pop than rock,' Kahn-Harris pointed out.
'We are seeing a lot of quite aged bands touring at the moment, and the question is always raised: When does this end? And how does this end?' Kahn-Harris added.
Sabbath's sound was also shaped by industrial forces that have since waned in the West.
When he was 17, guitarist Tony Iommi severed the tips of two fingers in a sheet-metal factory accident. Defying doctors who told him he would never play again, he fashioned two thimble prostheses out of melted dish detergent bottles. Crucially, he detuned his guitar so the looser strings would be easier on his injured fingers — and inadvertently invented heavy metal.
This was 'the best thing that ever happened to music,' said Deena Weinstein, a professor of sociology at DePaul University in Chicago.
Birmingham now makes the most of its claim to being the 'home of heavy metal.' This weekend, the city was given over to the band, with murals and club-night after-parties, as well as its main train station rebranded in Osbourne's honor. But reaching this height of reverence wasn't easy.
'I took their master tape to 14 record labels in London, and they all turned me down,' the band's first manager, Jim Simpson, now 87, told NBC News in an interview. A pivot came when the band changed its name from the original, Earth.
'I insisted we change it,' he said, speaking outside a Sabbath tribute night in nearby Dudley on the eve of the main show. 'From that moment on, things changed,' he said.
And so, as fireworks shot into the summer gloaming above Villa Park, that historical chapter came full circle. After the lights came on, some wandered around the plastic cup-littered arena as if in shock.
'That was just historical,' said Robert Cote, 59, who is here with his wife, Josee Lessard, 51, from Quebec, Canada. 'All I can say is, we will never see anything like this again.'
Alexander Smith
Alexander Smith is a senior reporter for NBC News Digital based in London.