The Softness of Metal

Keith Kahn-Harris recounts watching Ozzy Osbourne’s final concert - a livestream from Villa Park - while nursing a broken ankle, and finds himself unexpectedly moved to tears. Ozzy, confined to a bat-shaped throne and weakened by Parkinson’s, back and neck problems and other ailments, sings with fierce intensity rather than stage theatrics; a procession of artists including Metallica, Gojira, Yungblud and Lzzy Hale perform brief tribute sets dominated by Sabbath covers. The writer’s emotional state is compounded by personal events that week: his son’s first-class degree, his fractured ankle, and guilt about not visiting his father in a nursing home who also has Parkinson’s.

He argues that Ozzy’s frailty exposes a truth about heavy metal often masked by its macho imagery: beneath the patina of hardness lies sorrow, vulnerability and the sound of suffering. Drawing on decades of engagement with the genre, his own chronic fatigue and the experience of raising a daughter with disabilities who embraces sitting at gigs, he shows how metal has become more inclusive and how songs like “Suicide Solution,” “So Tired” and “Mama, I’m Coming Home” - alongside Metallica, Pantera and Tool - make pain central to the music. Ozzy’s final, vulnerable performance convinces him that metal is a space that honors flawed, fallible bodies and communal love as much as transgression.