Who is on the cover of Black Sabbath’s debut LP?: “It was absolutely freezing”
It’s one of the greatest album covers of all time. Like a creepy wood straight out of the Evil Dead, a witchy entity whose identity remains unnervingly obscured stares into your soul from a hazy distance, pulled into the icy trance of some malevolent, supernatural being that haunts England’s centuries-old mills or abbeys.
Released in 1970 and still standing as the foundation for heavy metal, Black Sabbath’s eponymous debut provided a cover destined to be poured over, the LP age affording the intrepid record buyer the chance to scrutinise every detail of Black Sabbath‘s haunting cover in giant, glorious, 12.5″ x 12.5″ as its title track emits from your turntable. Opening its gatefold revealed a sinister inverted cross containing the LP’s songs and credits, plus a cryptic poem possibly alluding to heroin.
Named after the low-budget ’63 horror film featuring Boris Karloff, singer Ozzy Osbourne remarked to NY Rock in ’02 that bassist Geezer Butler remarked “strange that people spend so much money to see scary movies” when observing the cinema queues for the film’s re-run. Guided by some smart marketing as well as creative intuition, Black Sabbath pursued a deeper, darker variant of bluesy-hard rock that hadn’t been heard in such a visceral way, speaking to the tumultuous social climate anathema to the hippie residue still hanging on.
For over 50 years, Black Sabbath‘s chilling cover has fascinated metalheads and musos alike. The mysterious figure is unnamed, and even the artist responsible is simply credited as ‘Keef’. The cover’s designer was Keith Macmillan, who also designed Sabbath’s first four record covers, artwork for David Bowie and Rod Stewart, and later video promos for Kate Bush and Motörhead.
Listening to Black Sabbath‘s master tape for inspiration, Macmillan revealed to Rolling Stone in ’02, “If I remember rightly, I just listened to the music.” He added: “Obviously, the lyrics go in the back of your mind, but it was more just the overall vibe that struck me. Sorry to talk like an old hippie, but you have to go with a kind of overall feel for the art.”
Selecting the 15th-Century Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire for its eerie and neglected atmosphere, Macmillan knew he needed the right model for his spooky photoshoot. Needing someone with small stature to amplify the environment’s foreboding presence, Macmillan recruited Louisa Livingstone from the Annie Walker modelling agency, remarking: “she was quite petite, very, very cooperative. I wanted someone petite because it just gave the landscape a bit more grandeur. It made everything else look big.”
Arriving first thing in the morning on a chilly Winter’s day, Livingstone, wearing little else but her black robes, recalled the shoot: “It was absolutely freezing. I remember Keith rushing around with dry ice, throwing that into the pond nearby, and that didn’t seem to be working very well, so he was using a smoke machine. But it was just one of those very cold English mornings.” Her clutched hands, long seen as some menacing gesture of black magic, are likely just the result of Livingstone keeping her hands warm.
Released on Friday 13th, it proved to be an iconic cover that still possesses a strange energy all these years later. Its mysterious star went on to work with Macmillan again on Fair Weather’s Beginning From an End and later Queen’s Jazz. Going on to work in film and television, Livingstone’s most iconic role was her most cryptic, for years never knowing her name but lurking in every metalhead’s psyche.
