Before Ozzy Osbourne passed away this past Tuesday (July 22nd), his bandmate Bill Ward spoke to Mike Stark of LA Radio Sessions about Black Sabbath’s farewell show “Back to the Beginning.”
When Ward was asked how he felt when they played that final note at Villa Park in Birmingham, England, the drummer revealed that his first thought was to check to see how Osbourne was doing.
“My feeling, at that point, was really to get off the drum [riser]. Really, that’s what I was thinking about, and to see if Ozzy was okay. That’s what I was thinking about,” he said, before adding: “And making sure Geezer [Butler, bassist] and Tony [Iommi, guitarist] are heads up. And then I wanted to see the audience, so I went out and I applauded the audience. So that’s what was on my mind.”
He continued: “And I looked behind me, and my family was there, and I applauded my family and people that were around me on the stage. I had a lot of staff members there, and I applauded them. So it was about just basically honoring all the people that had been listening. That’s exactly what I was doing. It wasn’t really anything that was deeper or mature or anything. I just wanted to say thanks to everybody. There was a lot of musicians there that I know, and I was applauding them as well. I love them very much. As you know, we’ve had our radio show for many, many years, so we’ve met a lot of artists.”
As for how Sabbath decided which songs they were going to play during their short four song set, Ward explained:
“I think it was a common denominator of what we thought we might be able to play. There was a couple of other songs that we tried. [It] didn’t quite work out. I can think it was [about] finding the most popular songs — actually, popular is not a very good word, ’cause there’s probably a lot of songs that are popular. Definitive — yeah, let’s go with definitive, as being the most definitive songs that work for all of us, all of us being the bandmembers.”
