Beginning To End…The Definitive Edition Ultimate Music Guide: Black Sabbath

What is this that stands before me?

As you’ll read in this definitive edition Ultimate Music Guide, Ozzy Osbourne ended his professional life very much as he lived it: very loudly, in front of a frenzied crowd.

The events of the final Black Sabbath show, Back To The Beginning, this past July was an impressive farewell that Black Sabbath and Ozzy fans didn’t feel they necessarily had any right to expect. That, however, would be to reckon without the unique character of the man and his determination as a performer. As venerated as he was a a solo star, Ozzy knew that he would be nowhere without the original Black Sabbath. And if he was going to be leaving the stage, then he would leave it after playing with them.

Ozzy was a big fan of the band, and so are we. In these 172 pages, you’ll be able to read a definitive account of the group. We’ve written in depth about Sabbath’s albums and compiled our favourites from among the many event-packed, generally outrageous, quote heavy encounters with Ozzy. You’ll read comprehensive recent interviews with Geezer Butler, Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, but it’s Ozzy who brought sheer colour to the band’s collective weight. As painful as it was for him to leave the group, his joy in talking about it was unconfined.

As he told us when he provided a generous introduction to the first edition of this magazine, he even had a positive take on the bad times. “Sabbath were ripped off fucking royally but I said to Bill Ward one day – ‘Bill, we’ve been ripped off, but we’ve changed the rest of our lives for the better.’ We were in a position we could never have imagined. We signed our first publishing deal for £105. I remember thinking ‘£105!’ I’d never seen that much money in my life. We had the worst deal in the world, but everybody did. When you’re a kid you just want to get out there.”

The longer it continued, the more Ozzy’s career took unexpected turns, all of which you can read about here: satanic panic, sentimental hits, duets with Miss Piggy, reality TV triumph. It’s the nature of that format to help bridge the gap that separates celebrities from the person in the street but such was his infectious personality, Ozzy had been doing that for years.

Staging the Back To The Beginning show in Aston, Birmingham – where Black Sabbath lived and first formed – helped underline the point. Success notwithstanding, he hadn’t changed that much since then. And as difficult as relationships with the band may have been from time to time, his opinion of Black Sabbath never changed much either.

“We’ve been friends, we’ve been enemies, said all sorts of things about each other,” he told us a few years ago, “but no-one can come up with them riffs like Tony Iommi. I don’t know how he does it. It’s scary, like “What?” Sometimes he would come in and say, “Ah, I’ve got nothing.” Then he’d be tuning up and this amazing fucking riff would come out. “Well, that sounded like something, Tone…” You could give him any instrument and he’d come up with something…”

If you enjoy Black Sabbath anywhere near as much as Ozzy did, hopefully the following pages will have something for you. Enjoy the magazine! It’s in shops now, or you can get yours here.