Why do heavy metal bands love The Beatles?

The idea that heavy metal fans can agree on anything is tenuous enough, but a band of all things? You have seemingly no chance. There’s the school of thought that any band that raises its tempo above a resting heartbeat can’t be metal. A school that if you can’t play ‘Eruption‘ after 13 Snakebite and Blacks, you’re not a guitar player. Another school that if you play to anyone you haven’t bled for, you’ve sold out. Yet, the closer you look at metal bands’ discographies, the more you realise that they might all be in the same school about this one thing.

Which, bafflingly enough, is The Beatles. The band that gave us ‘All Together Now’, ‘Yellow Submarine’ and ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, whose music you probably sang in school assemblies, and whose songwriter went on to create The Frog Chorus. I know how that sounds, and obviously there’ll be a sizeable portion of the metal community that’ll scoff at that, but hold on now, because I brought receipts.

All you have to do is look at the sheer number of bands that have covered the Fabs and just how deep that particular rabbit hole goes. There’s no better place to start than with one of the most famous Beatles fans on the planet, the dearly departed Ozzy Osbourne, who regularly credited hearing ‘She Loves You’ on the radio with convincing him to be a musician. His Beatles cover came in 2005 when, in a move that is profoundly poignant today, he put his own spin on one of the best Beatles songs ever, ‘In My Life’.

Which other metal bands have covered The Beatles?

The man may have dismissed the term ‘heavy metal’ out of hand, but Motörhead frontman Lemmy Kilmister was, nonetheless, an icon of the genre. He was also a Beatles die-hard who was lucky enough to actually see them at the Cavern Club when they were breaking out and learned to play guitar by playing along to their album Please Please Me. His cover came on an entire compilation called Butchering The Beatles, where metallers of every generation gave the Fabs their best shot. Lemmy’s was a perfect fit, joining John 5 and Eric Singer on a rollicking cover of ‘Back in the USSR’.

Alice Cooper was also a massive fan of The Beatles. While he actually appears on Butchering The Beatles too, adequately howling through ‘Hey Bulldog’, more fun is his quite frankly baffling appearance in the hilariously awful 1978 movie version of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. He makes a decent hash of ‘Because’ in his role as an evil cult leader, not a patch on Aerosmith’s legitimately boss version of ‘Come Together’ from the same deeply regrettable motion picture, though.

However, it’s one thing for a bunch of boomers who grew up with the band to love The Beatles; what about all the metalheads who came next? Surely it’s less that metalheads love Ringo and the rest and more that it was difficult not to in the 1960s? Well, you’d be surprised. Goth metal titans Type O Negative have covered The Beatles multiple times. Like Lemmy, the band had wheeled out a version of ‘Back in the USSR’ live, but their main coup was getting the green light to record a medley of Beatles songs built around the song regularly credited with being a blueprint for heavy metal, ‘Day Tripper’.

They weren’t alone. Soundgarden, Helloween, and even Metallica themselves all brought The Beatles’ back catalogue to life, and it goes deeper than that. The further underground you go, you’ll find other metalheads with Beatles covers to their name. The Melvins actually have two, Buzz Osborne and co putting together terrifying versions of ‘I Want to Tell You’ from Revolver and ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’. However, those aren’t the strangest cover versions out there, not by a long shot.

While a fairly straightforward cover of ‘I’m Only Sleeping’ might not sound like anything to write home about, it is when it’s coming from the mouth of one of the most respected black metal vocalists ever. It’s true, Quorthon (or Thomas Börje Forsberg to his mum) of Swedish black metal legends Bathory once put that cover together for a compilation album in 1998.

The list goes on. I haven’t even gotten to Ghost’s absolutely hilarious, Hammer Horror indebted cover of ‘Here Comes The Sun’, but the rest, I’ll leave to you to discover. I think the picture that gets painted here is one that flies in the face of heavy metal fans being close-minded. If anything, being into music that extreme means you’re almost certainly going to listen to everything in between. Thus, it makes sense that so many heavy metallers are also die-hard fans of arguably the greatest band of all time.

Related Topics