Stop Interrupting my Dinner!

If you can get past the altered DaVinci painting of the Last Supper depicting Jesus dining with "Geezer" Butler, Bill Ward, Toni Iommi and Ozzy Osbourne, you will find a half concert, half documentary of the original line up of Black Sabbath performing on a reunion tour in 1999.

Black Sabbath - The Last Supper is a 2 hour DVD that mixes performances from that reunion tour with interviews with the band.

Songs Included

A greatest hits line up of the group is included in this DVD, War Pigs, N.I.B., Electric Funeral, Fairies Wear Boots, Into the Void, Sweet Leaf, Snowblind, After Forever, Dirty Women, Black Sabbath, Iron Man, Children of the Grave and of course Paranoid are included.

The concert performances

The songs themselves are performed pretty well. Tony Iommi sounds fantastic, wailing away on his left handed Gibson SG, he provides the same solid guitar work that he did when the band was founded. Bill Ward provides powerful drumming to back the band behind his huge double bass drum kit. "Geezer" Butler too, provides the same powerful driving bass riffs that drove the band "back in the day".

Ozzy sounds good but not great. I saw Ozzy "back in the day" fresh during his "Diary of a Madman" Tour, (1982?) when he still sounded great. On this tour, his lyrics are amazingly coherent, but you can begin to see the effects of a life time of self abuse. Having recently watched the Heaven and Hell concert with Ronnie James Dio fronting the band, it is easy to see who is still the better singer. (and if you have to ask, it is undoubtedly Dio). However, Ozzy performs the songs and makes it clear that these are the songs he sang with the band. He doesn't however run around on stage like he used to, it is more of a shuffle.

Many songs don't even get to be completed on this DVD, before they finish, the interview section interrupts.

The Interviews

Why why why, do documentary films want to mix the interviews and backstage stuff with the actual concert footage? Separate it, I want to watch the songs, and I want to watch them all in a row, not interrupted by interviews after each and every song. Yes that's right, on this DVD you don't even see two songs in a row. Nevertheless, some of the stuff was somewhat interesting. The song N.I.B. was explained for example (look in my eyes you'll see who I am, my name is Lucifer, please take my hand). I always thought it was some dark reference, but it was a joke of some sort. Ozzy thought that drummer Bill Ward's head looked like the nib of a pen with Ward's new short haircut. The nickname Nib stuck with the drummer, and as a joke, a song was named N.I.B. on the first album.

I do wish they provided subtitles for one member of the band so that when he talked I could understand. Bill Ward was very understandable, so was Tony Iommi and "Geezer" Butler.

The band talks a lot about their abuse of drugs and alcohol. Bill Ward expressed a lot of regret about his lifestyle back then and even admits to hospitalizations and breakdowns due to drug abuse. It was also during this period that they kicked Ozzy out, and the band members all discussed this. Ozzy must have been quite a disaster to be kicked out of the band, when the rest of them were also obviously having major problems with drugs and alcohol.

Although some stuff was interesting, a lot of it was just boring, it seemed like it was the heavy metal version of The View.

Sound Quality

The sound was good here, with nice bass. The surround sound added some ambiance and fullness. PCM Stereo or Dolby Digital 5.1 can be selected.

Video Quality

Although this wasn't shot in high definition, video looked very good. The show was letter boxed though, so when you zoom in the image to fill a wide screen television, you lose some video quality. On the song Dirty Women the camera focuses on several female members of the audience who bared their souls and more for rock n roll.

Summary The performances by the band were quite good, and I would rate them four stars. Audio and video also got four stars. I even found some of the interviews interesting. However, I can't give this DVD more than 3 stars, because I really was annoyed by the fact that the songs are not shown as a concert, and some songs are even cut short for interview segments. If I had known this, I wouldn't have even picked this DVD up, I am not a fan of music documentaries, I buy music DVDs to see concerts, not listen the band chatter. When I want to learn about a band, I do it the old fashioned way and read a book. Regretably, since few concerts exist of Black Sabbath, if you want to hear these songs performed by the original line up, this is one of the only choices you have, because the only other concert DVD Never Say Die, has below average audio and video.

Want to read about other Black Sabbath Concerts, Dio Concerts, or concerts and video collections in general?

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