Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne’s Back To The Beginning farewell show more than lived up to musical director Tom Morello’s billing as “the greatest day in heavy metal history”.
But while the godfathers of metal have officially retired for good this time, does that mean Ozzy, guitarist Tony Iommi, bassist Geezer Butler and drummer Bill Ward are done with music too?
Thankfully, that’s not entirely the case – it turns out that there could be more music to come from at least some of the members. This is what the four members of Black Sabbath are doing next.
Ozzy Osbourne
Back To The Beginning marked Ozzy’s official retirement. He’s made it clear that he’s never going to play live again and certainly not tour. Earlier this year Sharon Osbourne told Classic Rock: “He’s done. Literally after this, we’re going to go home and shut the door.”
But that doesn’t mean he’s stopping for good. While there are no plans for a new album, Ozzy told Classic Rock before the gig that he could still be tempted into the studio for the right project.
“As far as recording goes, I still enjoy doing my own work,” he said. “I also enjoy singing on other people’s work. For the foreseeable future I will keep on recording, if the projects interest me.”
One thing that is definitely in the pipeline is a new autobiography, Last Rites, due to be published later this year. The follow up to 2009’s I Am Ozzy, it reportedly focuses on the last seven years, including the various healthy issues he’s dealt with.
“People say to me, if you could do it all again, knowing what you know now, would you change anything?” says Ozzy of the book. “I’m, like, ‘Fuck no. If I’d been clean and sober, I wouldn’t be Ozzy. If I’d done normal, sensible things, I wouldn’t be Ozzy. Look, if it ends tomorrow, I can’t complain. I’ve been all around the world. Seen a lot of things. I’ve done good… and I’ve done bad. But right now, I’m not ready to go anywhere.”
Tony Iommi
The guitarist has been working on his first solo album since 2005’s Fused.
“It’s really coming on now,” Iommi told Classic Rock ahead of the farewell show. “I go in on a Monday or Tuesday with [producer] Mike Exeter and we put ideas on the tracks.”
Having enlisted an all-star array of vocalists for 2000’s self-tiled solo album and worked with ex-Deep Purple/onetime Sabbath singer/bassist Glenn Hughes on Fused, he’s cagey about who will handle vocal duties on the new album.
“I was going to use different singers, then I was going to do instrumental stuff, I’ve got stuff with just one singer,” he told Classic Rock. “We’ll see which way it goes.”
Geezer Butler
Compared to Iommi and even Ozzy, Geezer Butler’s future plans are vague. He told Classic Rock that he was still writing music, but he had no plans to release it.
“I am always fiddling about in my home studio, but mainly for my own enjoyment,” he said. “If I ever did write some stuff that I thought good enough for anyone else to hear, then I’d release it, but I’m quite happy just fiddling about. It’s good for the old brain cells.”
Bill Ward
In contrast to Geezer, drummer Bill Ward is sitting on a pile of unreleased music. In 2023, he told Classic Rock that he had a total of seven unreleased albums. One of these, Beyond Aston, was begun in the early 1990s and finished in 2019. “It sounds incredible. A fucking masterpiece, even though I say so myself,” said Ward, whose last solo album, Accountable Beasts, came out in 2015.
He added that the hold-up was trying to find someone who would release the albums in physical formats. “It’s not for lack of trying,” he said.
More recently, he revealed that two of those albums “are nearly finished”. He told Long Beach radio station 99.1 KLBP-FM: “We’ve been in the studio. We’ve been living in the studio, is what we’ve been doing. And we’ve got two albums that are nearly finished. And we will put them out. And we are finishing up.”
Regarding what his new efforts will sound like, Ward said: “I’ve just let everything go. I basically don’t give an ‘F’, and I think it shows up in the record. I don’t have anything to swagger about. I wanted to play something that plays in my heart and then comes out of my soul. I wanted to play some things that keep me awake at night.”