Black Sabbath released the live album The End on November 17, 2017. It captured their February 4 concert at Birmingham’s Genting Arena, the closing night of their farewell tour. Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi and Geezer Butler performed with drummer Tommy Clufetos and keyboardist-guitarist Adam Wakeman, taking a set built around Sabbath’s early catalog back to their hometown.
The recording followed the evening from its opening song, “Black Sabbath,” through the closing “Paranoid.” Across 17 tracks and nearly two hours, it kept the band introductions, instrumental passages and drum solo alongside the songs. The band’s official live video for “Paranoid” presents the performance that ended that tour.
Birmingham was a deliberate destination. In a September 2017 interview with Metal Hammer, Iommi explained that he had pushed to finish there, even though ending the run in America would have been easier. “It’s where we all started,” he said. He also described music as an escape from the rough Aston neighborhood where they had grown up, a background he felt had helped shape Sabbath’s aggression.
The set itself had to balance what the musicians wanted to revisit with what Osbourne could comfortably sing. Iommi explained that they had tried material they hadn’t played for years and could work out the instrumental parts, but some original vocal lines sat too high. Osbourne wanted to reproduce those performances faithfully, which risked wearing out his voice. That practical limit helped shape the familiar-song core of the show. Elsewhere, an instrumental medley joined “Supernaut,” “Sabbath Bloody Sabbath” and “Megalomania,” giving those riffs a place without requiring their full vocal performances.
There was still room around “Iron Man” and “War Pigs” for songs such as “Into the Void” and “Snowblind.” Clufetos also had a featured passage in “Rat Salad” and the drum solo that followed it. The album preserved those changes of pace in the concert’s running order, with space for the instrumentalists as well as Osbourne.
The release arrived on double CD and triple vinyl alongside DVD and Blu-ray editions. A companion documentary, Black Sabbath: The End of the End, had screened in cinemas in September 2017. The November package presented the complete concert, with additional studio performances included on the video formats and a separate bonus CD in the deluxe box.
Those additional performances became The Angelic Sessions. Recorded at Angelic Studios in the days after Birmingham, the five-song session revisited material absent from the tour set, including “The Wizard,” “Sweet Leaf” and “Changes.” Iommi told Rolling Stone that scheduling it after the concert removed Osbourne’s worry about losing his voice. With the touring obligation finished, they could try songs that had been left outside the main show.
Butler recalled that the sessions went ahead without rehearsals. For “Changes,” from Vol. 4, he returned to the Mellotron part he had played on the original recording, admitting that he made mistakes during the new performance. “We did only one take,” he told the magazine.
