Metal music would not be what it is today without Black Sabbath’s music. Some of their influence was evident from the beginning with the iconic cover of their 1970 self-titled debut album. The cover showed a cloaked woman standing against a wooden setting and had set the tone of the genre’s aesthetics – dark and gothic. Now, the mysterious woman depicted on the cover is being revealed.
The artist behind the cover, Keith, “Keef” Macmillan broke years of silence on the subject and talked to Rolling Stone about the process of making the cover.
According to him, the model used for the cover was Louisa Livingstone who was 18 at the time of the shoot. The shoot took place at the Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire. “Nowadays it’s very much more modernized, beautified, and touristed. Then, it was quite a run-down and quite spooky place. The undergrowth was quite thick and quite tangled, and it just had a kind of eerie feel to it,” he recalled.
Livingstone herself remembers the shoot as a very cold experience. “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.”
