September 18, 2025. Tony Iommi appears at the back of the stage of the Birmingham Hippodrome at the climax of the opening night of Black Sabbath: The Ballet. Grinning broadly, guitar in hand, he plays the ageless riff to Paranoid as the audience erupts in excitement at this surprise appearance.
It’s an extraordinary moment. While there are plenty of metal t-shirts scattered around the audience, it’s a predominantly “high culture” crowd, dominated by the middle-aged and seniors (and, it has to be said, the white). Yet they seemed as appreciative of the Sabbath star and the music they’ve been hearing all evening as the most passionate metalhead.
Iommi, like the rest of his band mates (including the recently deceased singer Ozzy Osbourne), has come a long way. Black Sabbath’s four founding members all grew up in working-class homes in Aston, with little education and no prospects other than factory work. Even when Sabbath achieved global stardom in the late 1960s they were critically reviled for the most part. The grimy antithesis of hippiedom and swinging London, the band’s career was marked by chaos, excess and moral panic.
So how could we have arrived at the point where Tony Iommi could be lionised in a high culture venue? Is metal, that most despised of genres, becoming mainstream? Is it now part of high culture?
Well, maybe up to a point. But Iommi’s reception at the Hippodrome was, above all, a Birmingham reception.
A lot has changed since 2023, the first time the ballet was put on. Visit Birmingham in September 2025 and Black Sabbath are everywhere, the focus of the official citywide celebration “Summer of Sabbath”. Following Ozzy Osbourne’s death on July 22, the summer seems to have been extended indefinitely.
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On the day I attended the ballet, I took in the Ozzy Osbourne: Working Class Hero exhibition at the Birmingham Museum, followed some of the heritage trail to the site of the Crown pub, where the band held their first show, took in the tributes to Ozzy at the Black Sabbath memorial bench and admired Ozzy the Mechanical Bull in the Grand Central mall.
The centrepiece of the celebrations was to have been last summer’s Back to the Beginning show on July 5 at Villa Park, a final appearance from the band and from Ozzy as a solo artist, featuring some of the biggest stars in metal. However, when Ozzy died later that month, the Birmingham-wide celebrations suddenly took on a poignant, elegiac flavour (and brought countless mourners to the city).
So it’s hardly a surprise then that Black Sabbath are now a symbol of Birmingham as resonant as the Beatles are for Liverpool. You might be a hardcore ballet aficionado and have no time for metal riffs but, if you are a Brummie, why wouldn’t you cheer at a surprise appearance by one of the city’s beloved sons?
Still, it would be entirely wrong to treat Black Sabbath: The Ballet as mere Brummie-metal propaganda. It succeeds brilliantly on its own terms. Carlos Acosta, director of the Birmingham Royal Ballet, is a world-renowned figure and he draws on a superb array of choreographers and composers to come up with a fusion of dance, metal and new music that offers a fresh way to engage with Sabbath, metal and rock.
There are, it is true, some gauchely rockist gestures from the onstage guitarist Mark Hayward that seem to try a little too hard. But they are outweighed by moments of thrilling beauty. There is moment at the end of the first act where the dancers spin ecstatically round to the culmination of Paranoid (the song reappears throughout the show). It’s a viscerally energetic scene that leads to cries of joy from the audience. Then, in the second act, interview extracts from the four members of the band (and Sharon Osbourne too) tell Sabbath’s story as the dancers move against a stark backdrop of six neon strings.
If you know metal, it shouldn’t be surprising that the ballet works so well. For one thing, as a genre it is in love with all that is classical – metal is high culture dressed as the lowest of the low. Metal is also music that animates the body and takes it to a place of ecstasy. The cliche that it’s music for white boys who won’t dance just won’t wash any more.
Black Sabbath: The Ballet will be touring the country this autumn and I fully expect it to resonate way beyond Birmingham. Seeing it in Sabbath’s home city is a particularly memorable experience though. Tony Iommi may have toured the world, but there is nothing that can match being recognised and lionised in one’s city of birth.
Black Sabbath: The Ballet is touring Birmingham, Salford, Plymouth, London and Edinburgh until Saturday November 1
Keith Kahn-Harris is currently working on a book about the death of Ozzy Osbourne and its wider implications
