It’s a fact that there have been a ton of unofficial releases of the Back To The Beginning concert flooding the market since the show last summer. I was actually there in person, so it’s been a special mission for me to get a hold of some of these in an attempt to relive a bit of that magic. Nothing really comes close to having been there, of course, but some bootleg releases are better than others. I am hoping that we get an official release sometime this year, but I guess things like that take time. There has been definite word of a shortened theatrical version of the concert on the way, but I haven’t heard anything about a music only or home release yet. Who knows what will happen, but I have my fingers crossed.
A couple months ago, I talked about a multiple LP release that Evil Dead Records put out. I only got the Ozzy and Sabbath records, but they have since pressed the sets performed by Gun’s N’ Roses, Metallica, Slayer and maybe one or two others. Notably for me at least, they didn’t do one for Pantera, which was a bit disappointing. I think I may have a solution to that problem on the way, but I’ll cover that in another post. The Evil Dead releases were pretty good, and they certainly looked nice. You can check out a review for those here, and I think they are still pretty widely available.
What I was really looking for, though, were the complete Sabbath and Ozzy sets on a single LP. A few labels attempted to do something close, but they needed to cut parts out to make everything fit. I almost bought another version that looked cool, but upon closer inspection, I realized had cut out “Mama, I’m Coming Home”. That was a deal breaker even for me. Usually, I am someone who buys anything that has Ozzy’s picture on it, but I found that omission to be particularly egregious. Fitting a bunch of songs on a single record isn’t easy, but thankfully, an anonymous label has solved this problem.
Simply titled Back To The Beginning 2025, this single LP is available on either red or blue transparent wax and comes in a glossy printed sleeve with a poly-lined inner. Each color is limited to 250 copies, and there is a hype sticker on the front of each jacket indicating color. The full set-lists are intact, and the artwork and labels look great. The discs themselves are quite heavy, and both of my copies looked pretty clean. I did my regular cleaning routine on them anyway and moved the LPs into the rice paper sleeves that I use for everything. For testing purposes, I decided to spin the red copy, but the blue one looked just as nice.
Black Sabbath / Ozzy Osbourne – Villa Park, Birmingham UK – 5th July, 2025
A1 War Pigs
A2 N.I.B.
A3 Iron Man
A4 Paranoid
B1 O Fortuna (Intro)
B2 I Don’t Know
B3 Mr. Crowley
B4 Suicide Solution
B5 Mama I’m Coming Home
B6 Crazy Train
If you want a review of the actual music, there is some of that in my original review for the Evil Dead pressing. Pretty much everyone reading this will have heard the audio and watched the video by now, so I’ll just stick to the facts about this particular record and make this review short and sweet. This is a fantastic transfer from the soundboard audio that was used for the streaming video, and the editing and fading is flawless. There are no spaces between the tracks, which has been an issue on pretty much every vinyl version of this show that I have encountered up until now. You can just put this record on and be transported back to the show. As far as I know, it’s the best version we have up until the time of this writing.
The only very small issue I could find with the audio is a bit of low volume on the Ozzy side. If you take a look at the photos, you might see exactly why this happened. In order to fit all of the music on a single side of an LP, they had to cut the record almost all the way up to the label. Notice how there is almost no dead wax at all? This technique can work to fit more minutes per side, but it often lowers the volume and playback quality of the audio. Miraculously, the audio quality isn’t noticeably affected at all, and everything sounds great. They must have had just the perfect amount of space to make this possible, and the results are outstanding. Just crank it up and you won’t notice the difference.
Otherwise, there is only one thing with this release that bothers me. When they pressed the record, they put Sabbath on Side A, and Ozzy on Side B. This is, of course, the opposite of how the show actually occurred, since the reunited Black Sabbath was the closing act of the show. You can just play the B Side first to get the real experience, but I thought it was worth mentioned here, since this is literally the only thing I could find “wrong” with it.
Overall, I believe this to be the definitive release of the essential sets from Back To The Beginning that’s been put out on vinyl so far. There have been several excellent versions on CD and Blu-ray, but if you love your analog like I do, you can’t beat this one. It was difficult for me to find both colors, and I had to get them from two different countries. They weren’t expensive though, so if you can manage to find one in the wild, it will probably be for a great price. With only 250 copies of each color though, the time to seek one out is probably right now. I will try to cover at least one other release of this show, but if you are really looking for the Ozzy and Sabbath sets on wax, I wouldn’t wait around too long.
Good luck in the search!