(Credits: Apple Music)
Sun 1 March 2026 18:45, UK
Ozzy Osbourne wasn’t the kind of person who revelled in being one of the kings of heavy metal.
Black Sabbath may have helped keep a roof over his head for the first few years of his career, but a lot of his best moments were focused on making a scarier version of hard rock than anything remotely connected to heavy metal. As far as Sabbath were concerned, that kind of description was derogatory, but it turned out that some of the greatest musicians in their genre were following in their footsteps without even realising it.
But you can’t really say that heavy metal was created in one moment, either. Sabbath is definitely the frontrunner for the first official heavy metal band, but things were already getting heavier throughout the 1960s. Jimi Hendrix was blowing minds with what he could do with the electric guitar, and even before the summer of love began, everyone from The Who to the Kinks was trying to make rock and roll sound a little nastier than what had come before.
The Beatles threw their hat in the ring more than a few times when making songs like ‘Helter Skelter’ and ‘Hey Bulldog’, but something about Sabbath’s music felt different. The riffs Tony Iommi came up with were absolutely ferocious, and as the 1960s came to an end, they were leading the charge for what heavier music could sound like alongside the likes of Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple.
It took the rest of the world a while to pick up the mantle for proper heavy metal, but when the New Wave of British heavy metal started, there wasn’t a single person who wasn’t indebted to Sabbath when they picked up guitars. Everyone from Diamond Head to Iron Maiden were using the same playbook of heavy riffs whenever they wrote their songs, but if you were looking for the greatest heavy metal band after Sabbath, you just needed to look in their backyard half the time.
Birmingham was the rougher side of England at the time, and while Sabbath grew up in the factory town, Judas Priest was taking the crux of what they were doing and pushing things further. There were still some blues elements in their sound, but since a lot of their songs were riff-oriented and centred around Rob Halford’s massive voice, there was no one else that could compete with them when they roared out of the gate with albums like British Steel.
And while ‘The Prince of Darkness’ has a sound all his own, he felt that Halford was among the best heavy metal singers he had ever heard, saying, “(They) are not only mates of mine from my hometown of Birmingham, but one of the best metal bands of all time. (Rob Halford) can still hit the fucking notes which is mind blowing to me. He is one of my favorite fucking singers.” But what makes Halford so great is because of how different he sounded from every singer at the time.
Sure, there were people like Ian Gillan that could go for some massive high notes, but you would have sworn that Halford was the heavy metal Pavarotti whenever he reached up into that higher register. And he hasn’t exactly lost it, either, given that records like Firepower are as punchy as they were when Halford was still belting out tunes like ‘Painkiller’ back in the early 1990s.
Osbourne definitely had a much different instrument than what Halford was working with, but that didn’t mean that he couldn’t still appreciate what he was working with, either. Heavy metal wasn’t his plan when he was singing ‘Paranoid’ and ‘Iron Man’, but he was proud to have inspired someone that took music to as many people as Halford did.