While most bands tend to play it safe with early releases, occasionally you get one that throws caution to the wind and decides to think outside the box a little by trying their hands at covering someone else’s song.
It is a brave move for a band in their infancy, and one which Melbourne hard rock outfit The Dreadful Tides are about to take by covering a song from one of the Godfathers of heavy metal, Black Sabbath.
After just two previous single releases, The Dreadful Tides are releasing their version of N.I.B via a HEAVY premiere at 4.30 pm on April 29, reworking the original version significantly while somehow still managing to capture Black Sabbath’s original DNA throughout.
Guitarist Justin Strudwick (Struddy) sat down with HEAVY to talk about their version of Black Sabbath’s N.I.B.
“We’re really, really pumped for this song,” he beamed. “A review we got a little while ago in regards to the song was saying “they are a band that plays what they wanna listen to”, and I think that describes it well. We enjoy playing songs… writing songs that we enjoy, and covering songs that we enjoy and we wanted to add our own little flavour onto it. I think we’ve done the song some good justice, but I suppose on the 29th we’ll see what everyone thinks.”
Not only have The Dreadful Tides covered the song, they have also put their own spin on things which could be seen as blasphemous in some quarters.
Instead it provides a fresh, new take on a major classic, paying homage respectfully to the original while still splashing enough of their own musical stylings to make it a stand alone version.
“It was… we all agreed on a Sabbath song because at the end of the day it’s Sabbath – who you may as well say are the Gods of Metal and the founding fathers of it,” Struddy explained. “We found that everyone always seems to cover Paranoid or War Pigs or something like that – which isn’t a bad thing – and some of our riffs from songs when I’ve written them actually had that N.I.B kind of flavour. We were just jamming it one day and said it might be a cool song to cover. You see a lot of covers of it, but you don’t see people change it the way we’ve changed it, which was actually a decision made in the shower! I was in the shower one night and started humming along to the song and thought that would be cool as a different intro instead of having that big bass intro like they always do and every other cover I have ever heard of it does, so I threw it to the guys and we added a couple of twists and turns and went with it.”
In the full interview, Struddy talks about the changes made to the original song, how The Dreadful Tides stayed respectful to the original while still making it their own, the pressures of covering a band like Black Sabbath, the band’s upcoming EP and more.
