Key events
A couple more crowd shots coming in.
“Look at this! Look around at every one of you, my brothers and sisters”, Blythe says, getting a giant “Sabbath!” chant echoing around the arena. He refers back to the dismal wartorn 1970s when Geezer Butler wrote Children of the Grave: “This song is a warning, and a command to love yourself and love your brothers and sisters … Let the sunshine in!” Ozzy’s searchlight-beam of a voice doesn’t come as naturally to Blythe as it does to Hale, Belladonna or Buchanan, but it’s still excellent fun to hear Lamb of God tear into this really substantial Sabbath hit.
And the lyrics – “Must the world live in the shadow of atomic fear? / Can they win the fight, or will they disappear?” – feel as apposite now as they did in the nuclear-fearing 70s.
Lamb of God now, kicking into the pottymouthed Laid to Rest. Considering Ozzy has spoken about this livestream as a bit of an afterthought in all the planning, it’s really well executed. Not too late to drop £25 on it, there’s still about eight hours left!! Up to 411,000 watching there now.
Redneck next. They’ve given Randy Blythe a comically long mic cord, to allow him to stalk up and down the stage like an extremely aggressive standup comedian. Some great drumstick acrobatics by Art Cruz too.
Billy Idol just came on the livestream with a message of love for Ozzy and a really gorgeous cherry-blossom hue of lipstick. Looked like the hardest barmaid in a five-mile radius.
Halestorm are covering Perry Mason, a solo Ozzy song that was a reasonable No 23 UK chart hit in November 1995 – I remember this sounding really eerie and odd amid all the Britpop and dance of the era.
Hale and co actually paid tribute to Sabbath in song: 2015’s I Like It Heavy, a manifesto for rawwwk, has this:
I love to crank it up, make it thump, and lead on to the core
Head bangin’ in the pit and throwin’ my horns
And just like old school Sabbath, Zeppelin, and Lemmy
I need to drop it down low and make it heavy
“Where are all my women of heavy metal?” Hale asks the audience to some joyful female screams, and it’s a question you might ask of this lineup. Unless there are some other surprises incoming, this gig isn’t so much a sausage fest as the joint AGM for Richmond and Wall’s: Hale is the only woman among dozens of men on the lineup. “I see you, I fucking hear you, and I got you,” she tells the women in the audience, “this one’s for you.” Halestorm play a new unreleased song, Rain Your Blood On Me. Perhaps shorn of the need to preserve her voice for a whole set, Hale is absolutely shredding her vocal cords for this and it gets an admiring response.
Halestorm now, fronted by another Ozzy disciple in Lzzy Hale. Halestorm can get a bit of a rough ride from metal fans who see them as rather corny, but they’ve got some bangers – I loved this one from a few years back.
Per that Yungblud surprise that’s incoming, turns out it wasn’t that surprising after all, as he was pictured in rehearsals last night.
Marilyn Manson gives a statement, and this is aired in the stadium, to cheers apparently. Hmmm.
Anthrax crush their set
That was great! Well done Anthrax! Also they’ve somehow got past the moratorium on photos before the end of the gig, and we have these.
“All of us in the same place for one fucking reason, and that’s to celebreate the music Black Sabbath gave us,” Ian tells the crowd. “We’re not here to say goodbye, we’re here to say thank you.” Then he straps on a black Flying V for a cover of Into the Void, to a very admiring swell of noise from the audience. So much relish to the way he’s playing that brawny riff. This rules.
Now it’s Anthrax, adorably enough in matching T-shirts reading Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Scott Ian looks like he’s enjoying playing the high-speed complex riffs of Indians as much as he did when it was written in 1986. Joey Belladonna meanwhile is reaching the very back of the Holte End (or its opposite) with his voice, and it’s another reminder of just how deep Ozzy’s influence runs: these soaring declarations could have easily been uttered by the man himself.
A modest circle pit has broken out at medium tempo, by a group of fans who want to let rip but also know there’s a lot more time to go and they don’t want to sprain an ankle or have a blood sugar dip just yet.
Michael said earlier: “Queues for bars inside Villa Park are enormous already, before the bands have started. Today’s crowd is very thirsty.” Pace yourselves everyone!
Surprise guest from the future! Michael informs me that Yungblud is on stage now, doing a very good cover of Sabbath’s Changes.
Rival Sons now, with some distracting fashion choices of their own. You know from the guitarist’s moustache and leather trousers combo that he’d be prone to a steampunk side project, or discussing polyamory while microdosing mushrooms at Burning Man. Frontman Jay Buchanan however, whose holler is no doubt inspired in large part by Ozzy as well as fellow Midlander Robert Plant, is in arrestingly fine voice.
They do a cover of Sabbath’s Electric Funeral with that eerie riff made truly ghost-train spooky through some phantasmagoric pedal action, and Buchanan is once again channelling peak Ozzy. “We love you Sabbath, we’re thankful for everything you’ve done for us,” Buchanan says. Then it’s into another of their own numbers, Secret. They really throw down a marker with this set: that was terrific.
Jason Momoa introduces the gig
Ben Beaumont-Thomas
Jason Momoa thanks the “fucking epic” Mastodon. “Metal is in all of our DNA – every character I’ve ever played has been inspired by this music and built by this music, it’s in everything that I am … Today we celebrate heavy metal, a movement invented by Black Sabbath”. He also shouts out Birmingham, “the city that gave birth to them” and calls on everyone, no doubt to the consternation of the Villa groundskeeper: “Let’s tear this motherfucker down!”