Wearing a spangly jacket and walking with the aid of a silver-tipped cane, the grey-haired 86-year-old Milton Keanes shuffled onto the stage at the Old Court, Windsor to begin an evening of music and stories about his band Jazz Sabbath.
This is, of course, all part of the entertaining backstory that can be read on the band’s website Jazz Sabbath: The whole story or viewed on YouTube. In reality, Adam Wakeman (piano), Jonny Wickham (bass) and Arthur Newell (drums) served up a great evening of jazz interpretations of Black Sabbath material, spiced with jokes, stories and a bit of audience participation involving an accordion.
The Old Court was the perfect venue for this mildly eccentric and strangely English musical deceit. A bustling, friendly pub with a welcoming vibe and the auditorium right next door, the former police station, magistrates’ court and fire station is now a much-loved local community arts venue.
Under the guise of being Milton Keanes, Wakeman (sometime keyboard player with Black Sabbath and Ozzy Osbourne) used this device well to tell stories about songs that were (according to Jazz Sabbath legend) written in the late 1960s, lost and then stolen and recorded by Black Sabbath.
The band ripped through lots of material that features on their latest live recording and some of the earlier releases. Under the knockabout humour and manufactured history, this is a trio of wonderfully talented musicians who wear their craft lightly. Wakeman and Newell worked well off each other to give the songs interesting twists here and there. With the flick of a wrist and change from stick to brush, world-class drummer Newell, with his economical, understated style, helped segue the songs seamlessly during the evening.
Adam Wakeman has the same ability as his father Rick to weave unrelated themes into songs with effortless skill. Tonight, the James Bond theme and a few Beatles songs were among the impromptu ideas sprinkled into a set of Black Sabbath standards that included Children Of The Grave, Iron Man, Fairies Wear Boots, Spiral Architect and, of course, Paranoid. Some of the songs were preceded with witty anecdotes, one example being Wakeman telling of the perils of eating undercooked meat; this led to a performance of War Pigs as Raw Pigs, much to the delight of the audience.
Although some of the gags perhaps worked better if you were a Black Sabbath fan – and there were probably a few of those in the audience judging by the long hair and logo emblazoned t-shirts – overall it didn’t matter if you knew the original material or not. This was a trio out to entertain and engage, and it certainly did that over the space of two sets full of energy and fun. For an encore, an extended drum solo by Newell emphasised the jazz credentials of the band. When Wakeman and bassist Jonny Wickham returned to the stage carrying a Henry vacuum cleaner which then also featured in Newell’s solo, this showed the ease with which music and comedy merged in the act. The audience loved it.
A lengthy UK and European tour beckons for Jazz Sabbath, indicating the band’s popularity and broad appeal. For a band whose fictional mythology includes a batch of recalled albums being lost in a warehouse fire in 1970, it seems only fitting that one of their earliest gigs on this latest tour should be held in a building that was once a fire station.
Jazz Sabbath at The Old Court, Windsor, 22 September 2026
