The first rehearsal spot of Black Sabbath: where the very first heavy metal riffs were born

The building had barely just opened its doors when Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, Bill Ward and Ozzy Osbourne rented one of its rooms. Decades later, in 2015, researcher and guide Rob Horrocks —creator of the Crossroads of Sabbath tour— organized an event called “Ozzy Zig, The Witch & The Warpig” to commemorate the 45th anniversary of the Paranoid album.

During that event, around fifty fans listened to the band’s first two records on vinyl in the very same room where it had all begun.

“I love the idea that the guys booked this room all those years ago, and what they did here ended up shaping music for generations,” said Horrocks. “Even today, anyone could still rent this space to create. We should value our community centres and their creative potential.”

Sadly, the Newtown Community Centre closed its doors for good on October 5, 2019, after years of cultural and musical activity. Still, its legacy remains as one of the most symbolic places in the history of Black Sabbath and heavy metal.

In his autobiography “I Am Ozzy”, Ozzy Osbourne’s memoirs, the singer looked back on that very first rehearsal weekend with a mix of humour and nostalgia:

“That weekend we got together to rehearse for the first time in a community centre in Six Ways, one of the oldest and roughest parts of Aston. There was just one problem: we could barely hear the amps because of the noise from the cars going through the A34 tunnel outside. The racket got even worse thanks to all the cars and trucks pounding across the bloody concrete roundabout they’d built right on top of the tunnel.

Back then, they used so much concrete in Aston you’d think we were about to start wearing hard hats and calling each other comrades. I mean, come on — the fucking city was already depressing enough without adding even more grey to the landscape.

[…] To lighten things up a bit, one night I went out with a spray can (I’d knocked back a few beers) and started doing a bit of decorating. One of the things I painted on the wall next to the roundabout was ‘Iron Void’. I’ve got no fucking idea what was going through my head at the time.”

That graffiti, Iron Void, was a name Ozzy scrawled on a wall, not far from the Newtown Community Centre. At the time, the band was still called Earth —a name suggested by Bill Ward as a replacement for their very first one, Polka Tulk Blues Band. That original name had been Ozzy’s idea, which (according to him) came to him one day while taking a never-ending crap in the bathroom, when he spotted a jar of talcum powder with that brand name on the shelf his mum kept in front of him.

The thing is, that first name, born out of the stench of Mrs. Osbourne’s armpit, didn’t quite click with the rest. Tony Iommi used to say it reminded him of Ozzy sitting on the loo. As for Earth, it sounded like someone throwing up —because when they said “EEERRRFFF” in their thick Brummie accent, it came out like a proper gagging noise.

So, even before finding out there was already another band called Earth in the UK circuit, they were already toying with changing the name again. Iron Void was one of the options floating around in Ozzy’s own “jelly brain”, as he liked to call his grey matter.

In his memoirs and in several later interviews, Ozzy also recalled carving the phrase “Iron Void” with a knife or a stone into one of the bricks of his childhood home at 14 Lodge Road, Aston. We revisit that story in this book, at Ozzy’s childhood house —but as you can see, according to the man himself, that wasn’t the first graffiti of the mythical “Iron Void.”

Just a stone’s throw from the rehearsal room, in the Six Ways area of Aston, stood the Orient Cinema, a historic movie theatre opened in 1930 by Associated British Cinemas (ABC). Tony used to walk past it and was blown away by the long queues whenever a horror film was showing.

“Don’t you think it’s weird that people are willing to pay to be scared?” Tony said to the band. “Maybe we should stop playing blues and start writing songs that frighten people.”

That’s how they began working on the track Black Sabbath —although the name only came later. The idea came from Geezer Butler, inspired by a 1960s horror film starring Boris Karloff, also titled Black Sabbath. Not long after, that very song would end up giving its name not just to the track and the album, but to the band itself.

The neighbourhood of Newtown, also known as Aston New Town, lies just north of Birmingham’s city centre. It’s crossed by New Town Row (A34) and bordered by emblematic areas such as Aston, Lozells, Hockley and the Jewellery Quarter.

Among its points of interest are The Bartons Arms (a historic Victorian pub where local musicians used to gather), the old Aston Hippodrome, and The Drum Arts Centre, which became an important hub of Afro-Caribbean cultural activity.

Although the Newtown Community Centre is no longer in use, the building at 57 New Town Row still stands and has become a place of pilgrimage for some metal fans who want to see where it all began. So of course, the Metalhead Travellers couldn’t miss it.