Tony Iommi has revealed that he seriously considered cancelling Black Sabbath’s farewell show with Ozzy Osbourne because he feared that the singer was too weak to perform on stage.
In a new interview with Classic Rock magazine, guitarist Iommi also says that he didn’t want Osbourne to perform a set of his solo material before Sabbath’s performance ended the show.
The Back To The Beginning event at Villa Park in Birmingham on 5 July 2025 saw Osbourne singing solo and with Black Sabbath while seated on a throne. Just 17 days after the show, Osbourne died at the age of 76.
Back To The Beginning also featured sets by a host of bands who were influenced by Black Sabbath, including Metallica, Guns N’ Roses, Tool and Slayer.
Iommi tells Classic Rock: “I said to Ozzy: ‘I don’t think we should do it.’ I said: ‘We should just let the other bands play our stuff, and us come out at the end and say thank you. But it was for a good charitable cause, and eventually we said okay.”
Iommi explains that the band’s signature song Black Sabbath was dropped from their set because drummer Bill Ward had struggled to play it during rehearsals.
“We needed to rehearse with Bill, because it had been twenty years and he couldn’t remember how to play some of his stuff,” Iommi says. “We wanted to do the song Black Sabbath on the night but it was too difficult for him.”
When the members of Black Sabbath reunited to prepare for the Back To The Beginning show, it had been three years since Iommi had last seen Osbourne, and as he recalls now: “I hadn’t seen Ozzy for a bit, and it was difficult seeing him like that.”
Seeing Osbourne in such a frail condition, Iommi thought it would be best for Osbourne to cancel the solo set he had planned before Sabbath’s performance.
He admits: “I was concerned he was going to blow himself out, and by the time we came on he’d be struggling.”
In the end, however, Osbourne managed both sets, climaxing with four Sabbath classics: War Pigs, N.I.B., Iron Man and Paranoid.
“The adrenaline carried Ozzy through,” Iommi says. “And I’m so glad we did it. But of course we didn’t expect him to go so soon.”
Elsewhere in the Classic Rock interview, Iommi talks about his new solo album From The Dark, his first studio release since Black Sabbath’s swan song 13 emerged in 2013.
One of the key track on From The Dark is Death Watch, which features a guitar solo from Queen legend Brian May. “I’d already done a solo, but I took mine off,” Iommi says.
Iommi and May have been friends for decades, but even after all these years May was stunned when Iommi revealed how many riffs he has stockpiled on a number of CDs: “Five hundred, six hundred riffs,” he says. “Brian couldn’t believe how many I had.”
Iommi also recalls how, in the early 2020s, a famous producer tried to persuade him to make another Black Sabbath album with the others three original members of the band – Osbourne, Ward and bassist Geezer Butler.
The producer was Andrew Watt, who has recently made albums for Paul McCartney and The Rolling Stones.
“I’d met Andrew Watt when he was producing Ozzy,” Iommi says. “He was very keen and a bit too excited. He also didn’t know what it was like working with the original Sabbath, working with Bill.”
