More bands to be announced for the “Back to the Beginning” event

The live farewell spectacle that will be held next month for Black Sabbath‘s original band and leader Ozzy Osbourne has revealed some fresh details. “Back To The Beginning,” an all-star event, will take place at Villa Park in Birmingham, UK, on July 5. A who’s who of heavy metal stars will be heading to the stage to pay tribute, with many of them performing covers from the Sabbath and Osbourne catalogue, in addition to being the last scheduled live performances for the aforementioned heavy metal titans. Promoter Andy Copping, also of “Download Festival” fame, stated in a recent interview with Planet Rock that there will be a rotating stage during the event in addition to some as-yet-unannounced special guests appearing.

There’s a couple of acts that have confirmed but not been announced yet so they’re going to be part of the proceedings. There’s still one or two that have kind of popped their head up literally in the last week saying they would like to be part of the event. So we’re talking about how we can fit those into the schedule. That’s another thing we’ve got. We are completely full, we’ve only got a set amount of time, but we also don’t want to miss out on opportunities of people we think will also give us a second enhancement of how great the bill is. So, yeah, there’s gonna be two or three surprises.

Lots of people playing, lots of planning involved.

The event itself is going to be very fluid. We’ve got a revolving stage so when somebody is playing, we’re gonna be building up the back line and everything for the act after that. It is going to make things run really, really smoothly. We’re hoping for a 10 to 12 minute gap in-between each act, which I think is fair. Normally you go to a festival and it could be anything from half-an-hour to 45 minutes or more between acts. At this one, it’s going be very fluid. It’s going to be act after act after act. It’s almost like blink and you’ll miss it. You’re not gonna have a lot of time and to go off and do anything other than watch this amazing music!

The event is the focal point of a recently launched official charity auction. Gold plaques from Metallica, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, Guns N’ Roses, and many more rare and unusual objects are up for auction and can be found on ozzyauction.co.uk.