In the 2020s, a cursory search about the latest hot new band which has seemingly arrived from nowhere usually uncovers a private school education or the Wikipedia entry of some parent. Ozzy Osbourne, who died on 22 July 2025 following a long battle with Parkinson\u2019s Disease and mere weeks after Black Sabbath\u2019s farewell concert in their native Birmingham, had an early biography that is uncommon among successful musicians in modern Britain. The self-styled Prince of Darkness, who was part of the conception of heavy metal as it became a genre, was a working-class innovator.<\/p>\n
John Michael Osbourne was born in Aston, Birmingham, in 1948, the son of a father and mother who were both factory workers, at General Electric Company and Lucas Automotive, respectively. Growing up in relative poverty in a crowded terraced house, aged 11 the preadolescent Osbourne was repeatedly sexually abused by two boys, the emotional fallout from which led to the first of several teenage suicide attempts. Like his Black Sabbath bandmates Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, their previous work in sheet metal factories is not just biographical trivia but the key to understanding the sound they produced together, which still resonates half a century later.<\/p>\n
At least in its early years, heavy metal was a genre of urban Britain. Black Sabbath\u2019s most high-profile contemporaries, Deep Purple (London), Judas Priest (Birmingham), and Led Zeppelin (London), all formed in English cities under Harold Wilson\u2019s Labour government at the height of the post-war welfare state. This was at its most stark in Black Sabbath: Iommi\u2019s distinctive style came from losing two fingertips in a sheet metal accident. Iommi has also stated that original drummer Bill Ward \u2014 who played with the band for the first time since 2005 for their final show \u2014 would \u2018pick up rhythms from the factory press\u2019. Speaking in 2017, bassist Geezer Butler described wanting to put \u2018that industrial feel\u2019 into their music.<\/p>\n
The working-class life of 1960s Britain was imprinted in metal\u2019s DNA. No matter what direction Osbourne\u2019s life may have taken him in as the decades passed \u2014 becoming, by the 2010s, a multimillionaire media figure who publicly supported Israeli apartheid, not to mention credible allegations of domestic violence \u2014 centring the innovation of metal in post-war Britain\u2019s social democratic state should not be forgotten.<\/p>\n
How did this happen? One explanation for this is what the late cultural critic Mark Fisher called \u2018indirect funding\u2019, meaning Britain\u2019s post-war welfare state. Left-wing governments may not have typically funded these cultural products directly, but unemployment benefits and house prices kept low by the abundance of council housing gave individuals the space and free time in which to be creative.<\/p>\n
By the end of the 1960s, you could reasonably expect the working-class jobs that Ozzy and his band took before their big break to pay a decent, livable wage. Sure, they would not have had much money, but it would have been more than the innings provided by a contemporary world of zero-hours contracts, gig economy labour, with unpredictable shift patterns and constant surveillance enacting a psychological as well as financial toll on employees.<\/p>\n
The hyper-commodification of things we need to survive such as housing or water has placed a profound financial burden on working people. Instead of making strange new music \u2014 or art, or television \u2014 as they did during Britain\u2019s post-war boom, the next generation of working-class eccentrics and would-be innovators are now spending rehearsal time working longer shifts to pay their landlord\u2019s mortgage or contributing to the record breaking profits of energy companies.<\/p>\n
But what now of the city that birthed Sabbath, and metal itself? After four decades of \u2018unleashing the free market\u2019, the world that Black Sabbath was born in no longer exists. The Crown, the Birmingham pub that Black Sabbath played their first ever show in, has been closed for over a decade. More than just part of the city\u2019s music history, it is part of a wider trend \u2014 over 2,000 pubs have closed across the UK in the last five years, a rate of one a day. Music Venue Trust\u2019s 2024 Annual Report shows similarly grim news for grassroots music venues; 40 percent of all venues operating at a loss in the last year and an average of two are closing for good every month.<\/p>\n
There is no one reason for this. Some pubs never recovered after covid, a decade and a half without real terms wage growth for their customers as the average price of a pint of beer increases from \u00a32.89 in 2010 to \u00a34.83 in 2025 (significantly higher in cities) has hurt demand. Pub landlords and music venue owners have to subsidise the profits of private electricity companies just like the rest of us, paying more than double what they did a few years ago.<\/p>\n