Black Sabbath

Black Sabbath came crawling out of Birmingham in 1968, and rock has been sleeping with the lights on ever since. Tony Iommi played guitar, Geezer Butler bass, Bill Ward drums, and Ozzy Osbourne sang and blew harmonica; they had already worn the names Polka Tulk Blues Band and Earth before settling in 1969 on one with a little more brimstone in it. The recipe was simple and it was terrifying: take the blues, drag it down to a funeral march, tune the guitars low and mean, and fill the lyrics with the occult and horror-movie dread.

The first 3 albums did the damage. Black Sabbath and Paranoid both landed in 1970, Master of Reality followed in 1971, all of them sold, and they are still held up as ground zero for heavy metal. "Iron Man" stomps like something hauled out of a foundry, "War Pigs" lets its menace build at a crawl, and "Paranoid" goes off like a lit fuse. Then the ambitions widened, and Vol 4, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, Sabotage, Technical Ecstasy and Never Say Die! pushed the sound into experimental and progressive corners without ever letting go of the sludge.

Osbourne was fired in 1979, and Ronnie James Dio, late of Rainbow, stepped up for Heaven and Hell in 1980 and Mob Rules in 1981, the second with Vinny Appice in Ward's seat. When Dio and Appice left, Ian Gillan, formerly of Deep Purple, sang on Born Again in 1983 with Ward back behind the kit, and after that the doors kept swinging: Glenn Hughes, Tony Martin and a parade of bassists and drummers came and went, with Iommi the one fixed point and Geoff Nicholls holding down the keyboards from 1979 to 2004.

The original four got back together in 1997, cut the live Reunion and toured on and off, while the Mob Rules lineup carried on as Heaven & Hell until Dio died in 2010. The founders regrouped again, made one last studio album, 13, in 2013 without Ward, and wound up their farewell tour at home in Birmingham in 2017. The original lineup returned one final time for Back to the Beginning at Villa Park on 5 July 2025, and Osbourne died 17 days later. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inducted them in 2006, they won Grammys for Best Metal Performance in 2000 and 2014 and a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019, and on rock radio's countdowns it is "Paranoid", "Iron Man" and "War Pigs" that listeners keep dragging back up from the depths.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.