Credit: Carl Lender
October 20th, 2026 · 10:00am BST
Black Sabbath played their final ever gig on July 5th, 2025.
It was one of the most hotly anticipated gigs in the history of music. The men who essentially invented heavy metal came together with those they had inspired for one final blowout. As they rattled through ‘Paranoid’ to the packed-out venue in Villa, decades of amazing music were represented in a three-minute epic, and just like that, the story of one of rock’s greatest bands popped one final full stop on the page.
It was pretty unbelievable to watch. Regardless of whether you were one of the lucky few in attendance or watching from home, seeing Black Sabbath up there on stage, Ozzy Osbourne amongst his throne of rock and still singing like it’s the beginning of the ‘70s was a sight to behold. And yet, while the closing shot of the band’s career was draped in adoration, their music wasn’t always received quite so well.
If you ever want to truly understand just how ahead of their time Black Sabbath were, all you need to do is watch the music video for ‘Paranoid’. Here you have a heavy metal band, singing a song about depression, playing aggressive guitar music, and yet the visual depiction for as much has Sabbath dressed as hippies amongst a psychedelic spinning backdrop.
The visuals don’t match up with the music, and there’s a very obvious reason for this: no one knew what the hell to do with the sound of Sabbath. What they were doing was so dark, so gloomy, so unprecedented, that all labels truly understood was that people liked it; they didn’t really get what it was that people were liking.
A lot of the audience was the same. You had some musical outcasts who heard Sabbath and thought the band revealed something to them that had previously been under lock and key; however, there were other listeners out there who connected with other forms of music and thought Black Sabbath was just horrible noise. Before the band made it big and were recognised as being the minds behind metal, many crowds booed them off the stage and unleashed unfounded heckles.
Hindsight is 20/20, so it’s easy for the members of Black Sabbath to now look back at these criticisms and dismiss them; however, there was one that stayed with Tony Iommi for a long period of time. In an interview with Classic Rock in 2017, Iommi spoke about how far the band have come since the early days, and how surprised he still is given their initial gigs were littered with unwanted heckles and hatred.
Further reading: From The Vault
“How we got from those days to what the band eventually became, I’m really not sure. We would play places where nobody was interested. Or we’d turn up, and people would think that we were playing pop, when of course we weren’t,” he said. “I recall a gig at a place called the Toe Bar in Egremont, and this bloke shouted out: ‘Your singer’s crap.’ That was really embarrassing.”
The Sabbath guitarist concluded, “Of course, we improved as the years went by, but we certainly had to teach people – and ourselves – about what we were doing, because it was so different. It was a very steep learning curve.”
