There stands, in the concourse of the English city of Birmingham’s central train station, a 30-foot-tall steampunk monster: a giant bull, composed of sheets of metal and cogs and gears. Looming tall over commuters and shoppers, its eyes glow cold and its head, on occasion, lolls creepily from side to side, its mouth slacking open to emit a tinny roar. It is, to be coarse about it, a fucking weird thing to behold. Its name is Ozzy.
Originally known more prosaically as the “Raging Bull,” this enormous sculpture was created for the Birmingham-hosted 2022 Commonwealth Games—essentially a mini-Olympics for the British Commonwealth, a political association comprised of the UK home nations and a bunch of countries and territories that either remain in, or once were a part of, the British empire. A symbol of Birmingham’s industrial heritage, the bull was introduced as part of the tournament’s opening ceremony, but, when all was said and done, there came the question of what to do with this great, silly thing.
The plan had initially been to simply dismantle and forget about it forever, but the people of the city were sufficiently stirred by its grand strangeness that they intervened. A public campaign saved the sculpture, and, eventually, it was decided that it should be moved to New Street Station in the city center, where it would be placed on permanent display. A public vote was called to decide on a name for it and, in the end, Ozzy was selected—a tribute to a man who has come to be recognized as perhaps the city’s most cherished child: Ozzy Osbourne.
Ozzy Osbourne, who died on July 22, just three weeks after his farewell show with his band Black Sabbath took place, was a strange cultural figure. To many of my millennial generation, he was a foul-mouthed, slurring trailblazer of reality TV, the patriarch of a crass family that established a template for similarly vulgar TV-star families, like the Kardashians, to later build upon and perfect. The Osbournes, an MTV show broadcast between 2002 and 2005, followed the lives of Ozzy, his wife and manager Sharon, and their two tantrum-prone kids Kelly and Jack. And while it was clear to me as a watching child that Ozzy was some manner of aging rock star, it was not at all obvious that he was a genuine musical pioneer, maybe even a sort of genius. I didn’t even realize that he was from the same city I was.
Birmingham, the city of my birth, and where most of my extended family still lives, is an odd place. It wasn’t so long ago that it was one of the world’s great industrial cities, a key force within Britain’s Industrial Revolution and renowned for its manufacturing of cars, jewelry, chocolate, and lots more. But the deindustrialization that set in on the UK throughout the latter stages of the 20th century hit the city especially hard, transforming it and its surrounding region from one of the UK’s richest to one of its poorest. Today the city’s local government is effectively broke.
Throughout my entire lifetime of visiting year after year, Birmingham has been a city locked in a permanent identity crisis. Perhaps as a consequence of the speed and sharpness of its economic decline, its leaders and administrators seem to suffer from a profound sense of insecurity in which they perceive a constant need for their city’s reinvention. They seek always to establish a place for Birmingham in this 21st century, but, in practice, this means an endless cycle of regeneration schemes that quite literally bulldoze through its history. The city center that I know today is fundamentally different to the one that existed just before my lifetime, and, based on some wonderful photos I’ve seen of the old city, it seems they have made a mistake in tearing it apart. They have destroyed so much of the city’s past, all in pursuit of a nebulous imagined future.
I have an odd relationship with Birmingham. I sort of consider it to be a second home, a place in which I have spent much of my lifetime, but I in no way identify as a Brummie—a local. I am an outsider with close ties, but, in recent years, I have come to wonder if things might have felt a bit different for me had Birmingham’s cultural history, specifically its music, been celebrated in quite the same way as it is in other major English cities, like in Manchester or Liverpool. If Birmingham wasn’t constantly seeking to become something else, might I have found a way to identify with it during my visits from across the Irish Sea? If I’d been taught who Ozzy Osbourne really was, might I, as a teenager, have noted the city’s capacity for beauty?
I have in recent years—during the dying embers of my twenties—finally discovered metal music, which is perhaps a lot later than most people tend to find it. It is, accordingly, only recently that I have learned how central Birmingham was to the genre’s development. But it was indeed here, specifically in a working-class suburb called Aston, that Black Sabbath was formed. The band’s members—singer Ozzy Osbourne, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist and primary lyricist Geezer Butler, and drummer Bill Ward—all grew up in Aston throughout the ’50s and ’60s, surrounded by factories, pollution, and uncleared bomb sites, a legacy of the only recently passed Second World War. Life here, in Brum, could be hard in those days. A teenage Ozzy was once arrested for burglary, while a 17-year-old Iommi sliced the tips of two of his fingers off in an accident at the metal factory where he worked. It is not for nothing that the music these men would later create sounded so dark.
The young Black Sabbath, working under a succession of different names, originally started out playing straight-up blues, but industrial Birmingham eventually began to hammer itself into their sound. The rumble of machinery and the screeching of metal that they grew up surrounded by—drummer Bill Ward, it’s been said, used to tap along to the patterns of machinery he could hear from his childhood bedroom at night—came to be somewhat mimicked within their music. Iommi, after the accident that severed his fingers, had to totally reinvent his guitar playing to accommodate his injury. He switched to lighter strings, began to play more power chords, and, crucially, he tuned down his strings to reduce the pressure he needed to press down with. This innovation, which was born out of necessity, would later become a defining feature of future forms of metal. The brutalities of mid-century factory work, in a very real way, had helped to create this new sound.
The late 1960s in which Black Sabbath formed were, obviously, a time of great anti-establishment fervor, led most visibly by the American hippies. The hippies influenced many British bands of the time, notably the Beatles, but not everyone quite bought into the flower-power vibes. While Black Sabbath shared the same anti-war, anti-establishment outlook, they were uncomfortable with the California-tinged optimism that their hippie contemporaries emitted. The urban British temperament, in many ways, is just not calibrated for cheeriness. It didn’t make sense to be overly sanguine in an English industrial city as dreary as Birmingham, so Sabbath expressed their radicalism in a very different way. Rather than seeking to escape the bleakness of where they came from, they embraced it, and, in doing so, they offered their head-banging, moshing fans a sort of catharsis.
The recognition of how grim and scary things can get in the real world could be understood by Sabbath’s fledgling fanbase as a more authentic music than what the hippies had to offer them, and its sheer aggression brought release. Black Sabbath quickly became stars, and, throughout the first half of the 1970s, they released hit album after hit album, touring constantly and honing the metal sound we know today. They should, by rights, have made a lot of money during this early period, but, as they came to realize, they were being ripped off by their management, which was siphoning off the band’s riches as they toiled and succumbed to exhaustion and addiction. A change was needed, but, having fired their manager, they ended up becoming trapped in a legal saga that took its toll. It is from this mess of confusion, paranoia, anger and near-collapse that the band’s sixth album, Sabotage, was born.
Such a hopeless context is hardly ideal for creating good art, but it does seem to have imbued Sabotage, released in August 1975, with a sort of fretful urgency that makes the album compelling to listen to all these years later. It begins with the buzz of amps, a shrill moan, and the song “Hole In the Sky” pounding into life, telling a story that, really, doesn’t sound out of place or dated today. The final verse, in particular, feels like an apt and sober assessment of the present: “I’ve watched the dogs of war enjoying their feast / I’ve seen the western world go down in the east / The food of love became the greed of our time / But now I’m living on the profits of crime.”
The hippies get a lot of credit for their anti-war stance, but those words, delivered by Ozzy and backed by the band’s thunderous music, could, to my mind, give any of the flower children a run for their money. There may not be much in the way of hope within them, but they facilitate a sort of righteous anger and disgust in the listener, which, then as now, feels perfectly legitimate. We should feel disgust for the feasting dogs of war. It is a great song, but, before it resolves, it cuts out suddenly and we find ourselves thrust into the acoustic instrumental of “Don’t Start (Too Late),” almost in the same way that the Beatles’ “I Want You (She’s So Heavy)” had cut out on Abbey Road six years earlier. It is unsettling, and not very kind to the listener. It doesn’t intend to be.
The band’s paranoia and exhaustion are audible on the record, and, while their reasons for experiencing those things may have been specific to their circumstances, the music nonetheless resonates far more widely. The question, “Am I Going Insane?” is an apt one for anybody who has gone online or watched the news over the last few years, and, while Sabotage’s “Am I Going Insane? (Radio)” may be dealing with an overworked band on the brink of mental collapse, it nonetheless seems to capture something of the contemporary moment, defined, as it is, by governmental gaslighting, mass surveillance, and war-mongering. We live in crazy-making times.
This is a strange album, one that taps into the weirdness of alienation in direct and indirect ways both. “Supertzar,” with its choral chanting, is an unsettling wake-up call to the demons, and the final song, “The Writ,” which lyrically confronts the manager that the band felt had wronged them, gets under the listener’s skin with a horribly creepy intro of demonic laughing and tortured moaning. It is all very freaky and macabre, which is why I suspect that, in this jet-black age of economic decline and rising political authoritarianism, it still sounds good. Black Sabbath capture how odd it is to experience despair.
Sabotage was, in the end, the last truly great album of the original Black Sabbath’s run. A couple more weak albums followed; Ozzy left the group towards the end of the ’70s; and the line-up began to incessantly regenerate, much as Birmingham itself would do. Sabbath would take many different shapes over the years, but, earlier this very month, that original lineup of the boys from Aston came together for one last show. Ozzy’s health had obviously deteriorated to a great extent, so their set was limited, but, for a few songs at least, the four original members played together for what they knew would be the last time. It happened in Aston.
The whole of Birmingham seemed to embrace Black Sabbath for that final gig. The four members were recently granted the freedom of the city, while the tourist board declared a “Summer of Sabbath,” with events to be hosted in their honor. A bridge has been named after the band, a bench now bears their faces, and there is, of course, Ozzy the bull standing in New Street Station. All of a sudden, right at the end of Black Sabbath’s story, it seems Birmingham’s administrators have recognized that there are threads of their city’s past worth celebrating. It is a lesson they would do well to remember.
Ozzy Osbourne, the Prince of Darkness, was weird and shadowy and uncouth, full of contradictions and uncomfortable in his own skin. But he was able to embrace the darkness from within and around him, and, by some strange alchemy, use it to emit a sort of light. In that way, he embodied something fundamental about the hometown he has now left behind. Birmingham can be a bleak place. But, give it a chance, and it can produce some exquisite beauty, too.
