Duff McKagan looks great – perhaps because he’s living very clean these days. He told the Guardian’s Chris Lord all about he came back from the brink, in this 2023 interview:

There’s now 2.2m people watching online, and assuming the £25 fee is more or less the same globally, that’s £55m for charity. Even if that gets eaten into with all the production costs, what a payday for the chosen causes.

Another one from Never Say Die, namely Junior’s Eyes, Ozzy’s lachrymose ode to his late father. Slash delivers a masterclass in solo technique although there’s something a bit safe and purely accomplished about it compared with, say, KK Downing’s raw and dangerous one earlier on. Rose has warmed up a bit but I wouldn’t say he’s exactly an asset to this song.

Sabbath and Ozzy should be on stage right about now – the livestream is two hours behind the actual events – but I’m afraid Michael can’t feed in any live info from Villa Park as he’s having phone issues.

None of the bands are being paid today (and the Guardian has paid for Michael’s ticket) because the whole event is for three charities: Cure Parkinson’s, Birmingham Children’s Hospital and – huge nostalgia rush on hearing this name after growing up in Solihull – Acorns Children’s Hospice.

Sharon Osbourne told Billboard recently that she disinvited a band, who “wanted to make a profit, and it’s not the time to make a profit. After the show I’ll let everybody know who it was. I think people will be shocked.” Pass the popcorn when that detail comes out.

Note that the offending act is not Wolfgang Van Halen, who was on the original lineup but had to pull out because of touring commitments supporting Creed in the US.

Limp Bizkit’s Fred Durst gives us the day’s second rendition of Changes, this one pre-recorded in a studio with an acoustic guitar and cello. It can’t help but feel like a step down from Yungblud’s spirited take in the stadium, and Durst’s vocal-fried croak can’t remotely compete with Yungblud’s yowl. But his tribute beforehand is heartfelt: “I am here to honour the legend, the maestro ... I can’t imagine a world without Ozzy Osbourne.”

Slayer’s cover is Wicked World, reportedly the first ever original Black Sabbath song, recorded back in 1969, which segues into their own South of Heaven, and back into Wicked World. This is getting bootlegged to high heaven.

I once met Gary and Kerry from Slayer and they were the very epitome of the cliche that metal guys are sweet and lovely people because they get any and all aggro out on stage and in the studio. Honestly, they were like the proprietors of a cat cafe who happened to be wearing battle jackets. It was for this:

Whether it’s because there’s been plenty of pure silliness or classic rock or prog-metal, there hasn’t been a huge amount of call to mosh – but there’s a modest circle whipping up for Slayer now the tempo has gone to thrash. I think this crowd is more about awed appreciation than getting their shoulders dislocated, though.

Slayer walk out with a certain serenity … then kick into Disciple with a two-footed tackle above the knee. Gary Holt is doing making his fingers dance over the frets like a methamphetamine-powered Fred’n’Ginger, while Tom Araya seems to ward everyone off like a mad-eyed preacher: “I’ll never be the one to bear the cross!”

Coming to wash Tool away in a torrent of type A negative are Slayer, who – rather like Sabbath themselves – have done the classic metal band thing of saying they’re definitely splitting up and not touring again, then they un-split up and tour again. Sabbath called their final tour The End, while Slayer did The Farewell Tour. You can see where the confusion arose.

The Guardian’s Huw Baines was at their show in Cardiff on Thursday night.

This is picking up a bit now – or at least getting more noteworthy, with a cover of Paranoid’s Hand of Doom that’s heavy on Sabbath’s long, almost minimalistic verses in that song. And Ænema flows out of it, cleverly forming a continuum of war-paranoia from the Sabbath material: “Some say the end is near / Some say we’ll see Armageddon soon / I certainly hope we will / I sure could use a vacation from this / bullshit three-ring
circus sideshow of freaks.”

Still, glad that’s over tbh. It felt like drinking Huel for dinner: you know it’s technically good for you but it takes ages and isn’t particularly enjoyable.

Oof, Tool now. Six hours into the liveblog I think I could do with Steven Tyler yelling in my ears again. Instead we’re going into the prog zone with Forty Six & 2, which on record is six minutes long. They really are a band for people with more than one scientific calculator.

With his resplendent beard, hair and serious comportment, Zakk Wylde looks like he might potentially be some kind of chai-drinking ascetic, but actually he’s a complete sesh-lord.

He’s been reminiscing about Ozzy tours gone by to Loudwire Nights recently, recalling a conversation with tour manager Bobby Thompson. “He goes, ‘You’ve got to stay out of the web. He’s pulling you into the web.’ And the web was going out drinking with [Ozzy] every night. No one wanted to drink with Ozz except me because I was like, he’s the best. He’s the coolest. He’s the Fonz. I’d be drinking with Ozz [and so] Bobby was like, ‘Zakky, you got to stay out of the web.’ But I like the web, you know?

“Ozz, I didn’t know, is the last person you wanted to rob a bank with because he would name names and just tell everything to Mom. Sharon would go, ‘Well, who were you drinking with last night,’ and he would go, ‘I was with Bobby, Zack, Randy and Mikey.’ He would name names. He would tell you where the money was, where the bodies were buried. I was like, how come no one likes going out drinking with us? They were like, because they wanted to keep their jobs, that’s why. Stay out of the web, man.”

There’s now 1.5m people watching the livestream, and rightly so – from fun-loving party vibes to intimations of nuclear apocalypse, we’re getting the full breadth of what heavy metal can do.

More nuclear paranoia here after Lamb of God’s take on Children of the Grave: a Pantera take on Electric Funeral. Amid all the evident nuclear proliferation and incredibly careless diplomacy around war from Trump and others, it’s worth having this horrible portent spelled out again, full of all the cruelty, stupidity and insanity of war:

Robot minds of robot slaves
Lead them to atomic rage
Plastic flowers, melting sun
Fading moon falls upon
Dying world of radiation
Victims of mad frustration
Burning globe of obscene fire
Like electric funeral pyre

Wylde is chugging like no-one else today: truly heavy playing. He’ll be putting a long shift, appearing later as Ozzy’s guitarist pre-Sabbath.

Pantera get to do the first selection from Paranoid of anyone today, going slow and cosmic with their cover of Planet Caravan. This is an amazing arrangement, with a light but insistent rhythm picked out with sticks on a couple of tiny bongos, giving space for Wylde to wig out on a long-form jolting solo.

“Black Sabbath: we’d all be different people without them, that’s the truth,” Anselmo says. “I know I wouldn’t be up here with a microphone in my hand without Black Sabbath … who’s greater?”

“Make some space for me, I’m coming in!” Momoa is going to join the pit for this one: Pantera.

“This set goes out to Dimebag and Vince,” Phil Anselmo says, referring to the late Pantera members Dimebag Darrell and Vinnie Paul Abbott. The guitars here from Zakk Wylde are absolutely filthy, in the best way: stumbling blurts of noise stuck way at the top of the mix, lagging just a touch behind the beat to make for a really potent blues-metal.

What with Anselmo here – who gave a Nazi salute and said “white power” at a 2016 gig, which he later claimed was a joke about white wine – as well as appearances from Draiman, Tyler and Marilyn Manson, it certainly goes to show how hard it is to get cancelled in the metal scene.

And Hagar in turn taps in the next starry frontman: Tobias Forge of Sweden’s Ghost, who to me very much defines the phrase “fine if you like that sort of thing” but is certainly a coup, doing a suitably theatrical stab at Bark at the Moon.

Kourtney Kardashian, Travis Barker’s other half, is here. Wonder what she makes of Aston. Hagar says he and Barker “grew up together” in the same small California town of Fontana. Good lore. Not sure how the dates stack up.

This is real Disneyland stuff compared with the – I’m sorry for the snobbery – proper rock of Gojira, but still, I’m enjoying it. Hagar is bringing a cheery charisma to Flying High Again and it feels like we’re going to only ever be 70 seconds away from some hair-metal soloing for the foreseeable future.

Nuno Bettancourt, who is Portuguese, pays heartfelt tribute to Diogo Jota in his native language, having had a spell earlier in the evening in a Jota Liverpool shirt.

Then the raunch levels are set to “embarrassing uncle” for a run through the long-aforementioned Montrose song Rock Candy. Chad Smith looks like he’s enjoying laying down the simple swaggering groove to this.

Now this lineup is covering Sabbath’s Snowblind and Morello is playing his guitar with this teeth. KK Downing does the day’s best solo: a really seething, nasty, whammy-bar-tastic groan of noise played on a very cool red Flying V that writhes around for about three minutes.

Sammy Hagar emerges to tap out Corgan in this cock-rock royal rumble, promising “fun”.

Now a power-trio supergroup emerges to join in, with Smashing Pumpkins frontman Billy Corgan, Adam Jones of Tool, and KK Downing, once of Judas Priest – and they’re doing Priest’s Breaking the Law. It’s very fun to hear Corgan give his full Rob Halford impression – “brekking the lauwww!” – and he’s dressed like a Buddhist yoga instructor having a personal crisis, with long tabard and funky purple trainers. I once ruined/enhanced everyone’s evening at a rock club in Alicante about 12 pints into a stag do, by demanding the DJ play this and then going full pit-dancer when he finally caved.

With a combined age of 305, it’s impressive that Black Sabbath are getting back out there at all, and Tony Iommi admitted this week that the rehearsals have been a slog: “I wouldn’t say it’s been easy, it’s been tough, because none of us are getting younger and to stand there for a couple of hours is tiring.”

His comments reminded me of Michael’s brilliant recent feature for us, speaking to the ageing drummers of rock on how they keep going through this tough physical labour late in life.

Gojira now, which Michael just talked up as being one of the best sets of the afternoon. They open with Stranded, and those brittle, ratatat volleys of guitar fire are totally gripping, while Joe Duplantier is a cut above so many voices in metal (and that’s a lot of strong competition): ragged and desperate, like a man hauling himself soaking wet up a beach to warn you of something in the water.

Here’s our interview with them from 2021 and the release of their titanic album Fortitude.

The stage is getting spun around, presumably in anticipation for the drum-off that’s booked in after Gojira’s performance next.

“No matter what madness and division is going on outside of these walls, in here we’re just a bunch of headbanging riffloving freaks!” DuVall tells the crowd. But I can’t hear what’s next because the sound has gone off the livestream! The comment section calls as one for the person who can sort it out: “SHAROOOOONNN!”

OK phew: it was only down for couple of minutes, and we’re back for a hard-chooglin’ take on Sabbath’s Fairies Wear Boots. Close your eyes and DuVall almost sounds like Van Morrison if he went down a totally different blues pathway.

Skimming through the pre-show bumf, there is a fairly unrevealing interview with Ozzy Osbourne, although he does allude to not retiring from music entirely: “It’s a goodbye as far as my live performances go, and what a way to go out.”

Alice in Chains now, opening with Man in a Box. Frontman William DuVall (who replaced the late Layne Staley in 2006) swooshes around in tasselled leathers and is another one honouring a whole style of Ozzy-ish singing. Co-vocalist Jerry Cantrell isn’t faring so well, with a bit of an underpowered mic.

Not in person, but here’s Jack Black doing Ozzy’s Mr Crowley backed by a band of children – including Roman Morello, son of Tom, doing some insane lead guitar soloing, and Revel Ian, son of Scott, on bass. In this context it’s clearer than ever how much Black’s singing style is inspired by Osbourne almost to the point of parody (that’s a compliment).

Next it’s the aforementioned Yungblud performance of Changes, who pays tribute to the Portuguese footballer Diogo Jota who died in a car crash earlier this week aged 28. I honestly do not understand how Yungblud has had three back-to-back UK No 1 albums (the most recent one last week) when he seems to have an actively repellent force on melodies or hooks – but there’s no doubting he can connect when he actually has some, as he does here, bringing a lovely rasp into the edges of of his otherwise soaring voice. This power ballad was first done by Sabbath on Vol 4 in 1972, then again to chart-topping effect by Ozzy and his daughter Kelly in 2003.

Pop quiz: it was the second father-daughter duet to top the UK charts, but what was the first? Answer in five mins.

Jog on, Draiman! Ugly Kid Joe frontman Whitfield Crane replaces him, flanked by Frank Bello from Anthrax (joining bandmate Scott Ian who came on for the last song, Sweet Leaf) and Sleep Token’s drummer II (not what his mum calls him), the latter with his face typically obscured, today behind a golden skull. They’re doing Ozzy’s Believer and it’s a stately but mad-eyed rendition, further enlivened by a show of sheer technical guitar heroics by a soloing Bettencourt.

Another missive from Michael from two hours in the future. Fresh from being a surprise guest at Rod Stewart’s Glastonbury performance last weekend, Ronnie Wood has now appeared here too, joining Steven Tyler to perform Train Kept a Rollin’.

David Draiman from Disturbed comes on to replace Hale out front and perform Shot in the Dark, to some cheers but a substantial chorus of boos and middle fingers. Why? Well, he earned no small amount of controversy for sharing a picture of himself signing artillery shells used by the IDF in their assault on Gaza, specifically the words “Fuck Hamas”. He went on to say he is “pro peace and coexistence between all people”, though how that squares with signing artillery shells … Think we’ll sit this performance out.

Tom Morello’s All-Stars next (so that Supergroup A info before may be wrong now, soz). Morello said in a recent interview: “You don’t even know, there are some surprises on the bill — you have no idea and you’re going to lose your mind.”

He added: “It’s not just heavy metal that is in the music of Black Sabbath. It’s in every country and western stage show. Every time a pop musician brings out a distorted guitar. It’s in hip-hop. It’s in the music of Run-DMC. It’s in the music of Rage Against the Machine. Every band from the 90s era has at least one person who worships at the altar of Black Sabbath.”

A couple more crowd shots coming in.

“Look at this! Look around at every one of you, my brothers and sisters,” Blythe says, getting a giant “Sabbath!” chant echoing around the arena. He refers back to the dismal, wartorn 1970s when Geezer Butler wrote Children of the Grave: “This song is a warning, and a command to love yourself and love your brothers and sisters … Let the sunshine in!” Ozzy’s searchlight-beam of a voice doesn’t come as naturally to Blythe as it does to Hale, Belladonna or Buchanan, but it’s still excellent fun to hear Lamb of God tear into this really substantial Sabbath hit.

And the lyrics – “Must the world live in the shadow of atomic fear? / Can they win the fight, or will they disappear?” – feel as apposite now as they did in the nuclear-fearing 70s.

Lamb of God now, kicking into the pottymouthed Laid to Rest. Considering Ozzy has spoken about this livestream as a bit of an afterthought in all the planning, it’s really well executed. Not too late to drop £25 on it, there’s still about eight hours left!! Up to 411,000 watching there now.

Redneck next. They’ve given Randy Blythe a comically long mic cord, to allow him to stalk up and down the stage like an extremely aggressive standup comedian. Some great drumstick acrobatics by Art Cruz too.

Billy Idol just came on the livestream with a message of love for Ozzy and a really gorgeous cherry-blossom hue of lipstick. Looked like the hardest barmaid in a five-mile radius.

Halestorm are covering Perry Mason, a solo Ozzy song that was a reasonable No 23 UK chart hit in November 1995 – I remember this sounding really eerie and odd amid all the Britpop and dance of the era.

Hale and co actually paid tribute to Sabbath in song: 2015’s I Like It Heavy, a manifesto for rawwwk, has this:

I love to crank it up, make it thump, and lead on to the core
Head bangin’ in the pit and throwin’ my horns
And just like old school Sabbath, Zeppelin, and Lemmy
I need to drop it down low and make it heavy

“Where are all my women of heavy metal?” Hale asks the audience to some joyful female screams, and it’s a question you might ask of this lineup. Unless there are some other surprises incoming, this gig isn’t so much a sausage fest as the joint AGM for Richmond and Wall’s: Hale is the only woman among dozens of men on the lineup. “I see you, I fucking hear you, and I got you,” she tells the women in the audience, “this one’s for you.” Halestorm play a new unreleased song, Rain Your Blood On Me. Perhaps shorn of the need to preserve her voice for a whole set, Hale is absolutely shredding her vocal cords for this and it gets an admiring response.

Halestorm now, fronted by another Ozzy disciple in Lzzy Hale. Halestorm can get a bit of a rough ride from metal fans who see them as rather corny, but they’ve got some bangers – I loved this one from a few years back.

Per that Yungblud surprise that’s incoming, turns out it wasn’t that surprising after all, as he was pictured in rehearsals last night.

Marilyn Manson gives a statement, and this is aired in the stadium, to cheers apparently. Hmmm.

“All of us in the same place for one fucking reason, and that’s to celebreate the music Black Sabbath gave us,” Ian tells the crowd. “We’re not here to say goodbye, we’re here to say thank you.” Then he straps on a black Flying V for a cover of Into the Void, to a very admiring swell of noise from the audience. So much relish to the way he’s playing that brawny riff. This rules.

Now it’s Anthrax, adorably enough in matching T-shirts reading Sabbath Bloody Sabbath. Scott Ian looks like he’s enjoying playing the high-speed complex riffs of Indians as much as he did when it was written in 1986. Joey Belladonna meanwhile is reaching the very back of the Holte End (or its opposite) with his voice, and it’s another reminder of just how deep Ozzy’s influence runs: these soaring declarations could have easily been uttered by the man himself.

A modest circle pit has broken out at medium tempo, by a group of fans who want to let rip but also know there’s a lot more time to go and they don’t want to sprain an ankle or have a blood sugar dip just yet.

Michael said earlier: “Queues for bars inside Villa Park are enormous already, before the bands have started. Today’s crowd is very thirsty.” Pace yourselves everyone!

Surprise guest from the future! Michael informs me that Yungblud is on stage now, doing a very good cover of Sabbath’s Changes.

Rival Sons now, with some distracting fashion choices of their own. You know from the guitarist’s moustache and leather trousers combo that he’d be prone to a steampunk side project, or discussing polyamory while microdosing mushrooms at Burning Man. Frontman Jay Buchanan however, whose holler is no doubt inspired in large part by Ozzy as well as fellow Midlander Robert Plant, is in arrestingly fine voice.

They do a cover of Sabbath’s Electric Funeral with that eerie riff made truly ghost-train spooky through some phantasmagoric pedal action, and Buchanan is once again channelling peak Ozzy. “We love you Sabbath, we’re thankful for everything you’ve done for us,” Buchanan says. Then it’s into another of their own numbers, Secret. They really throw down a marker with this set: that was terrific.

You’ll be thinking: show me photos of all these starry metal shenanigans! I’m really sorry but Live Nation have told me there won’t be any photos available until the end of the gig, and the livestream doesn’t allow screengrabs. Use the power of your mind, I guess.

There are a notable number of empty seats there, but remember this was all going on two hours ago which is quite an early start for a massive stadium show. “Stadium really pretty full from the beginning – testament to the depth of the line up,” Michael says. “Maiden a fortnight ago had a higher proportion of battle jackets though.”

If you’re the keyboardist in a heavy metal band, you have to accessorise. Sunglasses, scarf, or big black top hat is the case here. Sorry, I don’t make the rules.

It’s all gone a bit Stomp at the end of Mastodon, as a load of tom-toms are whacked in a groove-metal beat by fellas from Gojira and more.

In addition to all the aforementioned, there’s going to be this lot doing something or other.

• Smashing Pumpkins’ Billy Corgan
• Tool guitarist Adam Jones
• Ugly Kid Joe frontman Whitfield Crane
• Korn frontman Jonathan Davis
• Former Judas Priest guitarist KK Downing
• Limp Bizkit frontman Fred Durst
• Ghost frontman Tobias Forge
• Soundgarden
• Sleep Token drummer II
• Aerosmith frontman Steven Tyler (vocals)
• Guitarist and producer to the stars Andrew Watt

Also – the livestream just crossed 200,000 viewers!

As we count down, here’s how it’s looking in Villa Park from Michael’s seat.

Backing guitarist Jake E Lee revealed some of the details about Supergroup A on Facebook recently: “Me, Mike Bordin, Dave Ellefson, Adam Wakeman, Nuno Bettencourt and [Halestorm’s] Lzzy Hale on vocals for Ultimate Sin. Minus Nuno and swap Lzzy for David Draiman for Shot in the Dark.” Both tunes from Ozzy’s 1986 album The Ultimate Sin.

Supergroup B is going to be fronted by Van Halen hollerer Sammy Hagar. “I’m so honored,” Hagar said in a recent interview. “I chose to do No More Tears. And Tom [Morello] goes, ‘Oh, that would be great’ … And then he comes back and says, ‘Guess what. Ozzy’s gonna try and sing five songs, and he wants to sing No More Tears. I said, OK: Flying High Again.” He’s also going to sing one of his own numbers, Rock Candy by Montrose, “because it’s from the same era as Black Sabbath – Montrose and Sabbath were from the same kind of era. So, I’m excited.”

Not massively well-known in the UK, Montrose were Hagar’s pre-VH band, whose self-titled 1973 debut was kind of doing what Led Zep were doing in the UK: forthright hard rock that would point the way towards a heavier, crunchier style later in the decade. Rock Candy is one of the slower, swaggering numbers – the kind of thing a roadside bar with a questionable alcohol licence would put on for “ladies’ night”.

Hosting it all is Jason “Ahquarman” Momoa – “metal to the core”, according to Tom Morello. So that’s why he looks so robust.

Momoa told Kerrang! that he got the call after he tried to blag some free tickets. “I was just calling my buddies. I called Scott Ian, I called Kirk [Hammett], I called people basically begging to go. And then Ross Halfin, who’s the photographer of every goddamn band, he hit me up … I said I was trying to get a ticket, then he’s like, ‘Sharon wants you to host it!’ I’m like, ‘What the fuck are you talking about, man?!’ I’m over here begging for a ticket and now they want me to host it! I’ve never hosted anything before but I’ve gotta go out in front of all these fucking people and host! And now it’s on pay-per-view. Jesus Christ… I’ll be shitting my pants but at the same time it’s the goddamn greatest metal show in history.”

Momoa is a very vocal metalhead, as this supercut demonstrates. His circle pit manners are excellent but as 2.24 shows, if you got in the way of Momoa mid-headbang you’d probably need helicoptering out of the venue.

Today’s livestream is on a two-hour delay, so us at home will experience everything later than Michael does in the stadium. Here’s the timings for how it will go down there, as leaked by Disturbed frontman David Draiman yesterday – all times BST.

Mastodon – 1.30-1.45 pm
Rival Sons – 1.52-2.07 pm
Anthrax – 2.15-2.29 pm
Halestorm – 2.37pm [not sure why this doesn’t have an end time, but am assuming 2.53pm]
Lamb of God – 3.00-3.15 pm
Supergroup A – 3.25-4.00pm
Alice in Chains – 4.07-4.22 pm
Gojira – 4.29-4.44pm
Drum-off – 4.51-5.01pm
Supergroup B – 5.08-5.48pm
Pantera – 5.55-6.10pm
Tool – 6.17-6.37pm
Slayer – 6.44-7.12pm
Guns N’ Roses – 7.21-7.46pm
Metallica – 7.53-8.23pm
Ozzy Osbourne – 8.38-8.58pm
Black Sabbath – 9.13-9.48pm

Someone with a head mic and clipboard is going to be stressed keep that all on track. And I suppose that’s just the one Tool song, then.