At Black Sabbath‘s final concert, Back to the Beginning, held on July 5, 2025, at Villa Park in Birmingham, Tobias Forge took the stage not as the frontman of Ghost, but solo in character as Papa V Perpetua. It was a significant moment: the original Black Sabbath lineup — Ozzy Osbourne, Tony Iommi, Geezer Butler, and Bill Ward — reunited one last time in their hometown, closing the book on a genre they helped define.
For Forge, who has long cited Black Sabbath as a formative influence, this appearance was both a tribute and a personal milestone. Forge performed “Bark at the Moon”, a song from Ozzy Osbourne’s solo catalog rather than a Black Sabbath track. It was a surprising choice, and not actually his first choice either.
In an interview with Planet Rock leading up to and following the event, Forge explained that while he had initially pitched deeper Black Sabbath cuts — including “Am I Insane” from the Sabotage album — most of the iconic or obscure tracks were already claimed by other performers. He wanted to avoid simply standing through extended instrumental sections of songs that featured long breaks without vocals.
As he put it: “There are a lot of Black Sabbath songs that have vocals, and then there’s two minutes of not-vocals, and then there’s a vocal bit.”
“I’m not trying to make fun of anyone but I can’t just stand there like that for two minutes [miming clapping along to the music]. So that had to play a part in my choice of songs, when we were figuring out what I was gonna do. I was figuring out what I was gonna do. I was, like, ‘Can I do this?’ ‘No.’ ‘Can I do this?’ ‘Already taken.'”
Among his original suggestions was a song from 1975’s Sabotage album that Black Sabbath themselves only played twice. “[One] of the songs that I wanted to do was ‘Am I Insane’, stuff like that,” said Tobias. “Because that, for me, that’s my childhood, songs like that.”
Still, Forge did a pretty damn good job with “Bark At The Moon”. Check out footage of that below.
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