Black Sabbath's 'Witch Woman' Releases Metal Tribute Songs — SkimNews
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- Louisa Livingstone, identified in a 2020 Rolling Stone article as the model on Black Sabbath's self-titled 1970 debut cover, has recorded electronic and rock music from Spain's Murcia region under the name Indreba — short for "Incredible Dream Band" — since around 2014.
- Livingstone released two metal-focused songs earlier this year, "Witch Woman" and "The Woman by the Mill," that directly invoke her image on the Sabbath sleeve, with lyrics including "Now I'm the face of heavy metal, leading the way," and a reference to Mapledurham Watermill where photographer Keith Macmillan shot the cover.
- Livingstone is developing a 23-minute mini-rock opera called Alice, based on Lewis Carroll's books her father read her nightly as a child; the concept grew out of a discussion about panpsychism with an AI chatbot about falling in love with AI, and includes a rock tango ("Feed Your Head") riffing on Jefferson Airplane's "White Rabbit."
- Livingstone attempted to raffle her autograph to one Black Sabbath fan around the time of the band's Back to the Beginning reunion concert to raise money for cat rescue, but she said the winner never claimed the prize despite repeated contact attempts.
- Livingstone said she has begun experimenting with cloning her own voice using AI and now views the technology as a creative tool rather than a threat, stating "it will always reflect the person who is using it" and their musical knowledge and taste.
Why it matters: Livingstone spent 50 years as an unnamed curiosity to metal fans before the 2020 identification, and is now converting that latent audience into an active one — a rare case of a model's accidental icon status being deliberately monetized and reinterpreted by the subject herself. Two metal songs explicitly aimed at Black Sabbath's fanbase signal a direct play for the audience she was invisible to for five decades.
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