The inventors of a genre of music were four young working-class men from Birmingham, Britain’s second-biggest city. People paid to watch scary films, they reasoned, so maybe they would pay to hear scary music, too. The rock band, which formed in 1968, adopted the name Black Sabbath. In Ozzy Osbourne—who died on June 22nd, aged 76—they found a singer who embodied heavy metal’s sense of dread (and who would later become a reality-TV star). The band’s furious rhythms and gritty guitars echoed their own tempestuous dynamic; when they were not breaking up and getting back together, they found the time to release 19 studio albums, which sold more than 75m copies. Here are five notable tracks by rock’n’roll’s “prince of darkness”.