Corey Taylor has paid tribute to the gods that made gods. Speaking ahead of Black Sabbath’s final-ever gig in Birmingham this weekend, the Slipknot frontman didn’t mince words about where it all began.
“Sabbath gave us the blueprint, Sabbath gave us the recipe. They gave us the cookbook, man,” Taylor told the BBC. “The mystique was in the lyrics. It was in the sound. It was in the way that everything was just a little darker.”
Fair play. Before the masks, before the chaos, before Iowa — there was Sabbath. And this Saturday (July 5), Ozzy, Iommi, Butler and Ward will return to where it all started for one final bow at Villa Park. It’s being billed as the last time the original line-up will ever perform together. The end, for real this time.
Taylor described the 1970 track Black Sabbath as “one of the scariest songs I ever heard” — a proper baptism by distortion. “When I want to go someplace mentally,” he added, “I go back to the beginning. I go back to Black Sabbath. The song. And the rest is history.”
He’s not alone. Sabbath’s shadow hangs over everything in metal. No Sabbath, no Slipknot. No Master of Reality, no Master of Puppets. Every doomy riff and satanic panic owes a debt to those Brummie bastards.
This weekend’s Back to the Beginning show is being framed as the heavy metal event of the decade. Tool, Metallica, Slayer, Pantera, Alice In Chains, Anthrax, Gojira, Korn and more will share the stage in what’s basically a living monument to riff worship.
And despite Parkinson’s and a list of surgeries as long as a setlist, Ozzy swears he’s “giving 120 per cent.” Whether he’s upright for two songs or twenty, the crowd’ll be there to scream for him anyway.
If this really is the end — and let’s be honest, it probably is — then Sabbath’s going out the only way they know how: loud, heavy, and absolutely bloody legendary.
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