When Black Sabbath’s Back To The Beginning event was announced in February, it was met with excitement from every corner of the globe. For one day only, the heavy metal godfathers’ founding lineup – Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler and Bill Ward – will reunite in a stadium spectacular raising money for charity. The resulting demand led to tickets selling out within minutes and hotels in a multi-mile radius hiking up their prices… but what if we told you this exact thing has happened before?
In 1985, it had been six years since Osbourne got booted from metal’s founding foursome, and internal disarray following 1983 album Born Again (featuring ex-Deep Purple singer Ian Gillan, plus a butt-ugly baby on the cover) had put the entire band on ice. However, none of that stopped Bob Geldof’s charity bonanza Live Aid from reaching out, seeing if they’d regroup in the name of raising funds for famine-afflicted Ethiopia.
If they accepted, Sabbath would play before 102,000 people at Philadelphia’s John F. Kennedy Stadium, on a bill including such greats as Neil Young, REO Speedwagon and Led Zeppelin feat. Phil Collins and broadcast to a global TV audience. The four-piece took the gig, but not for any of those reasons.
“We probably thought that it might be the first step towards getting back together again,” guitarist Iommi reflected in 2011 memoir Iron Man (via Rolling Stone).
Sabbath’s OG members rolled into Philly the day before the generational concert. Though there are conflicting accounts on what happened next, the outcome is undisputed: they got fucking hammered.
According to Iommi, the four men were so happy to be reunited that they rehearsed for only an hour then spent the night partying together. He wrote in Iron Man: “We got to the rehearsal space and were supposed to rehearse three songs. Instead of doing that we ended up talking about old times … We went back to the bar afterwards, had a great time together and got solidly sloshed.”
Bassist Butler said differently in a 1997 Kerrang! interview. “We were all drunk when we did Live Aid,” he remembered, “but we’d all got drunk separately.”
Either way, Sabbath woke up on show day far less than 100 percent – not ideal when your stage time is 9:55am and your slot is between the iconic performers Billy Ocean and Run-DMC.
“I had a dreadful hangover,” Iommi wrote. “So I put my dark glasses on and we played Children Of The Grave, Iron Man and Paranoid in the bright sunlight.”
The guitarist admitted to SiriusXM in 2020 that he was understandably anxious ahead of the show, as well: “It was a bit nervy because you don’t know how things are going to go with the equipment and all the stuff – and we hadn’t been onstage together for so long. You have to sort of suck it and see what’s going to happen.”
Despite the nerves, lack of preparation and alcohol-induced fatigue, the 15-minute set proved more than enough time for the original Sabbath to recapture their greatness. Osbourne motivated a crowd in the six-digits to clap and cheer along with Ward’s thunderous drums after Children…, then kept that energy alive by fist-pumping to Iron Man. Ward and Butler were perfectly in-sync while wildly whipping their hair. Finally, Paranoid scampered along even faster than usual, with Iommi still not missing a note in one of his most celebrated riffs.
It was an appetite-whetting preview of a comeback that, sadly, never came to pass. Though the exact details of why classic Sabbath didn’t fully return in 1985 remain unclear, both the band and Osbourne had their own projects to focus on at the time. Iommi was secretly in the studio that summer, recording what he hoped would be a solo album but came out as Sabbath’s 12th record, Seventh Star. Meanwhile, Osbourne was a bona fide, standalone star with his next effort, The Ultimate Sin, set to drop in January 1986.
Mercifully, Live Aid was far from the end for the formative lineup, who came back in both 1997 and 2012. They’ll bow out at the Back To The Beginning extravaganza in Birmingham’s Villa Park on July 5, all proceeds from which will go to the charities Birmingham’s Children’s Hospital, Acorn Children’s Hospice and Cure Parkinson’s. If the band’s last stand is even a quarter as good as the barnstormer they brought 40 years ago, it’ll certainly be a send-off for the ages.
