“Audiences today are much more fragmented,” said Keith Kahn-Harris, a sociologist and music critic who teaches in the department of psycho-social studies at London’s Birkbeck College. “It’s not an era in which you have that kind of mass audience” common among their midcentury forebears.There are exceptions — Taylor Swift and Beyoncé often seem ubiquitous — but these are “more pop than rock,” Kahn-Harris pointed out.“We are seeing a lot of quite aged bands touring at the moment, and the question is always raised: When does this end? And how does this end?” Kahn-Harris added.Sabbath’s sound was also shaped by industrial forces that have since waned in the West.When he was 17, guitarist Tony Iommi severed the tips of two fingers in a sheet-metal factory accident. Defying doctors who told him he would never play again, he fashioned two thimble prostheses out of melted dish detergent bottles. Crucially, he detuned his guitar so the looser strings would be easier on his injured fingers — and inadvertently invented heavy metal.This was “the best thing that ever happened to music,” said Deena Weinstein, a professor of sociology at DePaul University in Chicago.Birmingham now makes the most of its claim to being the “home of heavy metal.” This weekend, the city was given over to the band, with murals and club-night after-parties, as well as its main train station rebranded in Osbourne’s honor. But reaching this height of reverence wasn’t easy.Jim Simpson, Black Sabbath’s first manager, top right, at a fan event Friday.Dougie Wallace for Jattvibe News“I took their master tape to 14 record labels in London, and they all turned me down,” the band’s first manager, Jim Simpson, now 87, told Jattvibe News in an interview. A pivot came when the band changed its name from the original, Earth.“I insisted we change it,” he said, speaking outside a Sabbath tribute night in nearby Dudley on the eve of the main show. “From that moment on, things changed,” he said.And so, as fireworks shot into the summer gloaming above Villa Park, that historical chapter came full circle. After the lights came on, some wandered around the plastic cup-littered arena as if in shock.“That was just historical,” said Robert Cote, 59, who is here with his wife, Josee Lessard, 51, from Quebec, Canada. “All I can say is, we will never see anything like this again.”
The Black Sabbath singer’s final concert
