Black Sabbath in London, 1970 (public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
Black Sabbath
Four working-class kids from Birmingham who set out to be a blues band and accidentally invented a genre. The origin story is industrial in the most literal sense: a sheet-metal press took Tony Iommi’s fingertips, the workaround took the guitar down in pitch, and the sound that came out had no name yet. By the time the debut album landed in 1970, it did.
Black Sabbath is the trunk of more family trees than any other band we cover — doom, stoner, thrash, basically every heavy branch traces back through them. Which is exactly why they keep showing up in the lab: pull almost any metal thread hard enough and you end up in Birmingham, 1968.
Pull a thread
One Year Without Ozzy Osbourne: The Tritone That Refused to Resolve
A year after July 22, 2025, the three notes that opened heavy metal still haven’t settled — and neither has anything he built. Final part of our four-piece series.
Three notes, Friday the 13th
Pull up “Black Sabbath” — the song. Track one, side one of Black Sabbath, released on Vertigo on Friday, February 13, 1970, in the UK. Yes, a Friday the 13th. No, nobody planned the calendar. The universe just occasionally has taste.
Back to the Beginning: How Ozzy Osbourne Solved Rock's Last Show Problem
Rock almost never gets to choose how it ends. On July 5, 2025, at Villa Park, Ozzy Osbourne did — and the seventeen days that followed turned one farewell show into the most complete goodbye the genre has ever pulled off.
Rock is terrible at endings
Think about how rock careers actually end. A cancelled tour. A press release. A farewell run that quietly turns into three more farewell runs. A slow fade into casino residencies, or a sudden stop in a hotel room that nobody chose. The catalog gets a deluxe reissue and the story just… trails off.
Ozzy Osbourne's Guitarists: How Rock's Greatest A&R Career Happened by Accident
Part 2 of 4 in our series climbing to July 22. Ozzy Osbourne never scouted a guitarist in his life — he collided with them. Seven collisions, four decades, and a family tree half of rock still lives in.
The frontman who kept tripping over the future
Last week we traced how heavy metal itself started with an industrial accident in a Birmingham factory. Here’s the thing about Ozzy Osbourne: the accidents never stopped. They just changed shape.
The Factory Accident That Invented Heavy Metal: Tony Iommi's Last Day at Work
Almost a year after Ozzy Osbourne’s death, we’re tracing — in four connected pieces climbing to July 22 — how Black Sabbath happened at all. It starts not on a stage, but at a sheet-metal press in Birmingham — on the last day Tony Iommi ever intended to work there.
One shift left
Here’s the setup, and it sounds like a screenwriter invented it: Birmingham, 1965. Tony Iommi is 17, working in a sheet-metal factory, and he’s already quit. He has one shift left before he leaves to go be a professional guitarist — he’d lined up a gig with a working band and a run of shows in Germany. It was his mother who talked him into going in for that final day rather than skipping it — finish it proper.
Deep Purple Named Their Farewell Tour Ten Years Ago. They Just Refused to Finish It.
Deep Purple have a new album out — Splat!, released July 3 — and an 86-show run across 28 countries and three continents booked behind it. That’s not the schedule of a band winding down. Which is funny, because Deep Purple officially started saying goodbye a decade ago.
Asked about the end, bassist Roger Glover didn’t blink. “We’re not gonna have a final tour, a final gig and make a hoopla about it,” he told Paul Cashmere in a video interview with Noise11 (2026).