CELEBRATING THE MOMENT – EXACTLY 50 YEARS AGO – THAT HEAVY METAL WAS BORN

A high resolution photo of the band taken during their early years by Jim Simpson outside his home in Edgbaston

Birmingham.

Friday 13^th February 1970.

The album Black Sabbath was released and popular music was never the same again. The band who created that eponymously-titled album were destined to become arguably the most influential of all rock bands because not only did they single-handedly invent the Heavy Metal style, but in turn they influenced dozens of other sub-Metal styles, all of which acknowledge Black Sabbath as the fountainhead.

Listen to Death Metal, Thrash Metal, Doom Metal or Black Metal, and you will clearly hear the Sound of Sabbath.

Black Sabbath emerged from Birmingham’s Henry’s Blueshouse where they first appeared as Earth, met the man who managed them through to three worldwide hit records, Jim Simpson.

On Friday 14^th February 2020, exactly 50 years and one day later, the release of that milestone album was celebrated at the new home of Henry’s Blueshouse, which is organised by Jim Simpson.

Henry’s Blueshouse is located at The Bull’s Head on Bishopsgate Street, just off Broad Street.

The celebration featured live on stage Sabbra Cadabra from Manchester, the UK’s leading Black Sabbath soundalike, who performed the entire first album Black Sabbath, including the legendary thunderstorm introduction, surely the best ever introduction to any rock recording.

The band’s second set consisted of Black Sabbath’s second album – Paranoid. There were also talks and Q&As including an organiser of The Global Black Sabbath Convention, Stephen Knowles, the “Ozzy” from Sabbra Cadabra and Black Sabbath’s original manager, Jim Simpson.

The celebratory event included memorabilia and the launch of a six postcard photograph set of early, largely unseen, Black Sabbath photographs.