Earth T-Shirt

In February Birmingham Rocks celebrated exactly 53 years since the release of Black Sabbath’s first album, “Black Sabbath”. The event, The Birth of Metal, saw more than 250 people come together to celebrate that most significant release with Manchester-based Sabs sound-alikes, Sabbra Cadabra delivering three blistering sets from Sabbath’s early repertoire.

Bill Ward, the original Black Sabbath drummer, wrote a poem, “Testing one, Two, Three, Test, Test !”, which he had written specially  for the occasion, which was read out by beat poet, Giovanni Esposito, well known as former Birmingham Poet Laureate, Spoz.

The evening opened with a talk and about the early days of Sabbath, a Q&A held by the original Black Sabbath manager with questions submitted from as far afield as California, Argentina and Egypt, a sound-track of 1960s/1970s Birmingham bands, a slide show of rare, often unseen, early Sabbath memorabilia, wild dancing and a whole lotta head-banging going on.

There was also a launch of an exact replica of the very first T-shirt from the pre-Sabbath days when Ozzy, Tony, Geezer and Bill were known as Earth.