The rare Black Sabbath cover Ozzy Osbourne hailed as “the creepiest thing he’d ever heard”
Any Black Sabbath cover that unsettles even the Prince of Darkness himself surely can only come from the deepest, darkest coven of the heavy metal world.
Plenty have had a stab. How can they not? While dues have to be paid to Led Zeppelin and Deep Purple, it’s the four working-class Brummies from the Aston suburbs that can confidently stand as heavy metal’s big bang, all the headbanging offshoots and genre branches tracing themselves back to Black Sabbath’s foundational run of canonical LPs across the early 1970s.
Some have even made old Sabbath cuts much-loved numbers in their repertoire, from Pantera’s take on the intimately psychedelic ‘Planet Caravan’ to Faith No More’s bolshy grapple with ‘War Pigs’. Across the renditions from Melvins, Anthrax, Type O Negative, Metallica, and System of a Down, to name but a few, it’s easy to imagine such gems all finding life way back before fame and fortune, early songs that most of metal cut their teeth on when first jamming in their teen garages sporting prized Ozzy Osbourne T-shirts.
There’s a bit of a double twist to the band that reportedly cut “the creepiest” Sabbath cover. Now the fact that they’re from Sweden will offer no surprises. After all, Scandinavia stands as the regional mecca for all things black metal, the Nordic air and forlorn natural landscapes birthing some of the movement’s most infamous names, with Sweden alone responsible for the likes of Bathory, Dissection, and Marduk.
It turns out, however, the Sabbath chiller in fact hailed from the peaks of the 1990s pop charts.
The Kingdom of Sweden was having something of a pop explosion two decades on from ABBA’s global domination. Roxette had exploded to superstar status, Ace of Base were topping their charts with their reggae dance thump, and Dr Alban’s ‘It’s Life My Life’ scored the Eurodance explosion with vim.
Hurtling ahead of them all was Jönköping’s The Cardigans, whose shimmering blends of retro production and dynamic pop hooks saw them stand as one of the decade’s most ubiquitous songsmiths and rarely ever away from the Top Ten on both sides of the Atlantic with ‘Lovefool’ and My Favourite Game’ in the pop bag.
They were also massive Anglophiles. Taking their name from the impression of England’s chilly weather garments and even naming their debut Emmerdale after the TV soap, The Cardigans’ shift of ‘Sabbath Bloody Sabbath’s heavy blues attack to a diquieting lounge version prompted Osbourne to visit the band backstage after a Los Angeles show and declare it “the creepiest thing he’d ever heard”. “As a woman, I thought singing a song done by very manly men gave it a wonderfully creepy aspect,” Cardigans singer Nina Persson furthered to The Guardian recently.
The Cardigans developed a bit of a habit of taking on Sabbath, 1996’s First Band on the Moon featuring a cover of ‘Iron Man’, and Osbourne’s solo ‘Mr Crowley’ tucked away as the B-side to ‘Carnival’ the previous year. Yet among the throng of metal contenders clamouring at the Birmingham legends’ heavy songbook, The Cardigans join the ranks of rapper T-Pain as the select artists the Price of Darkness has ever explicitly praised for sheer originality.
