Black Sabbath chose "Paranoid" for their final bow. When the metal legends took the stage for the Back to the Beginning farewell show on July 5, 2025, they closed their four-song set with the 1970 single. Just 17 days later, Ozzy Osbourne was dead.
No other song would have made sense, Rolling Stone reports. "Paranoid" transformed Black Sabbath from a cult curiosity into one of the biggest bands on the planet. After that, they could never leave a stage without playing it.
The original Black Sabbath—Ozzy, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward—delivered a rendition at L'Olympia Bruno Coquatrix in Paris on December 20, 1970, just three months after the Paranoid album dropped. A professional camera crew captured the performance, and it remains the definitive version: raw and untouchable.
What came after was oceans of cocaine, booze, and internal chaos that slowly tore the band apart. They performed "Paranoid" hundreds of times over the decades, but it never quite hit the same way.
The song became so bound to Black Sabbath's identity that even after Ozzy split in 1979, he kept performing it as a solo artist with an endless rotation of lead guitarists. When Sabbath cycled through singers in the Eighties, they never dropped "Paranoid" either. The track was unstoppable—a metal institution.
Twelve different versions across 50 years, with countless singers and guitarists taking their shot at the doom-metal masterpiece. But none will hit quite like that final performance, when the original lineup chose to end their career with the song that made them.
