With the 50th anniversary of the debut album from Black Sabbath arriving last Thursday (February 13th), the mysterious woman in black on the cover of the LP has been tracked down by Rolling Stone for her first interview ever.
The woman, named Louisa Livingstone, was a model who was 18 or 19 years old at the time of the photo shoot in late 1969. Photographer Keith “Keef” Macmillan, who shot the cover picture, said, “She was a fantastic model. 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.”
Livingstone recalled, “I had to get up at about four o’clock in the morning, or something as ridiculously early as that. 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.”
Livingstone continued, “It was just, 'Stand there and do that.' I'm sure he said it was for Black Sabbath, but I don't know if that meant anything much to me at the time.”
The location, Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire, is now a tourist stop, but Macmillan said that back then, “It was quite a run-down and quite a spooky place. The undergrowth was quite thick and quite tangled, and it just had a kind of eerie feel to it.”
Despite going down in rock and metal history, Livingstone admits she’s not exactly the world's biggest Black Sabbath fan, saying, “Black Sabbath is just not my kind of music. I feel awful for saying it, because it’s probably not what people want to hear, but it isn’t particularly my kind of music. When I got the album, I gave it a listen and moved on.”
Livingstone currently records electronic music under the name of Indreba.