In the 2020s, a cursory search about the latest hot new band which has seemingly arrived from nowhere usually uncovers a private school education or the Wikipedia entry of some parent. Ozzy Osbourne, who died on 22 July 2025 following a long battle with Parkinson’s Disease and mere weeks after Black Sabbath’s farewell concert in their native Birmingham, had an early biography that is uncommon among successful musicians in modern Britain. The self-styled Prince of Darkness, who was part of the conception of heavy metal as it became a genre, was a working-class innovator.

John Michael Osbourne was born in Aston, Birmingham, in 1948, the son of a father and mother who were both factory workers, at General Electric Company and Lucas Automotive, respectively. Growing up in relative poverty in a crowded terraced house, aged 11 the preadolescent Osbourne was repeatedly sexually abused by two boys, the emotional fallout from which led to the first of several teenage suicide attempts. Like his Black Sabbath bandmates Tony Iommi and Bill Ward, their previous work in sheet metal factories is not just biographical trivia but the key to understanding the sound they produced together, which still resonates half a century later.

At least in its early years, heavy metal was a genre of urban Britain. Black Sabbath’s most high-profile contemporaries, Deep Purple (London), Judas Priest (Birmingham), and Led Zeppelin (London), all formed in English cities under Harold Wilson’s Labour government at the height of the post-war welfare state. This was at its most stark in Black Sabbath: Iommi’s distinctive style came from losing two fingertips in a sheet metal accident. Iommi has also stated that original drummer Bill Ward — who played with the band for the first time since 2005 for their final show — would ‘pick up rhythms from the factory press’. Speaking in 2017, bassist Geezer Butler described wanting to put ‘that industrial feel’ into their music.

The working-class life of 1960s Britain was imprinted in metal’s DNA. No matter what direction Osbourne’s life may have taken him in as the decades passed — becoming, by the 2010s, a multimillionaire media figure who publicly supported Israeli apartheid, not to mention credible allegations of domestic violence — centring the innovation of metal in post-war Britain’s social democratic state should not be forgotten.

How did this happen? One explanation for this is what the late cultural critic Mark Fisher called ‘indirect funding’, meaning Britain’s post-war welfare state. Left-wing governments may not have typically funded these cultural products directly, but unemployment benefits and house prices kept low by the abundance of council housing gave individuals the space and free time in which to be creative.

By the end of the 1960s, you could reasonably expect the working-class jobs that Ozzy and his band took before their big break to pay a decent, livable wage. Sure, they would not have had much money, but it would have been more than the innings provided by a contemporary world of zero-hours contracts, gig economy labour, with unpredictable shift patterns and constant surveillance enacting a psychological as well as financial toll on employees.

The hyper-commodification of things we need to survive such as housing or water has placed a profound financial burden on working people. Instead of making strange new music — or art, or television — as they did during Britain’s post-war boom, the next generation of working-class eccentrics and would-be innovators are now spending rehearsal time working longer shifts to pay their landlord’s mortgage or contributing to the record breaking profits of energy companies.

But what now of the city that birthed Sabbath, and metal itself? After four decades of ‘unleashing the free market’, the world that Black Sabbath was born in no longer exists. The Crown, the Birmingham pub that Black Sabbath played their first ever show in, has been closed for over a decade. More than just part of the city’s music history, it is part of a wider trend — over 2,000 pubs have closed across the UK in the last five years, a rate of one a day. Music Venue Trust’s 2024 Annual Report shows similarly grim news for grassroots music venues; 40 percent of all venues operating at a loss in the last year and an average of two are closing for good every month.

There is no one reason for this. Some pubs never recovered after covid, a decade and a half without real terms wage growth for their customers as the average price of a pint of beer increases from £2.89 in 2010 to £4.83 in 2025 (significantly higher in cities) has hurt demand. Pub landlords and music venue owners have to subsidise the profits of private electricity companies just like the rest of us, paying more than double what they did a few years ago.

An individualised call to ‘support your local scene’ is insufficient, and Britain’s pubs and music venues will need to be revived by some combination of state intervention and a strategy of what Tribune’s Marcus Barnett calls ‘Rebuilding the Red Bases’ — socialists with initiative building pubs, clubs and associations outside of market forces.

For metal, innovation still takes place, but on the margins. The idea that a band as extreme as American deathcore act Lorna Shore would be playing venues as large as London’s Alexandra Palace on their upcoming tour a decade or two ago is doubtful. Blood Incantation’s 2024 album Absolute Elsewhere finding commercial and critical success with audiences outside of metal’s often tight borders is another promising sign. But there are no breaks with the old, only extrapolations and reinterpretations of things which already exist. Here, the world of metal acts arguably acts a microcosm of broader music culture.

The ecosystem is overwhelmed by its past, skint and anxious, with no grassroots venues left for musicians to play with whatever free time they can wrest back from their employers and tech platforms; we have engineered a society that makes it nearly impossible for today’s youth to forge a musical culture in the way that Black Sabbath did nearly six decades ago. To reverse this decline, we must save the pubs, rebuild grassroots music venues, build genuinely affordable council housing, and regulate the tech companies that drain so much youth attention. No, there will never be another Ozzy Osbourne. But the least we could do is build a society that tries.