Louisa Livingstone spent fifty years as the most recognised anonymous face in heavy metal. She has now released a five-track rock opera drawn from Lewis Carroll‘s Alice books, made with the help of AI.
The EP, titled Alice, comes out under Livingstone‘s recording name Indreba, short for Incredible Dream Band, and is available through Bandcamp.
Livingstone is the cloaked figure standing before the watermill on the front of Black Sabbath‘s 1970 debut, an image that helped fix the visual language of the genre the record is widely credited with starting. Her identity stayed unknown for half a century until a Rolling Stone feature marking the album’s 50th anniversary named her in February 2020.
She was 18 or 19 at the time of the shoot, cast partly because photographer Keith Macmillan, credited on the sleeve as Keef, wanted someone small enough to make the surroundings loom. The location was Mapledurham Watermill in Oxfordshire. Livingstone has recalled a freezing early start, dry ice that refused to behave and a smoke machine brought in to replace it.
In the decades between, she worked as a model and actress and eventually settled in the Murcia region of Spain, where she began making electronic music around 2014 after realising what her computer could do as an instrument.
Earlier this year Livingstone put out a pair of rock tracks addressing her place in metal history directly. “Witch Woman” takes on the image itself. “The Woman By The Mill” is about the location of the shoot.
“‘Witch Woman‘ came out of nowhere as a sudden idea of what I could do,” she told Rolling Stone. “Black Sabbath fans loved the songs, which was gratifying as it was aimed at them and definitely deliberately in the metal genre for that reason.”
The reception has been a recurring surprise to her. “I still find it a little bizarre at times being the Black Sabbath ‘witch woman’ since of course I’m also a lot of other things … but there have been some very nice interactions with a few lovely Black Sabbath fans online,” she told the magazine.
Around the time of Black Sabbath‘s farewell show in Birmingham in July 2025, she raffled her autograph to raise money for cat rescue work. The result was not what she expected. “The winner never claimed the prize despite repeated attempts to contact them,” she said. “So my autograph is still extremely rare and unknown.”
The new work runs 23 minutes across five parts. Livingstone describes it as “a psychedelic rock opera featuring Alice who returns to explore the crazy 2026 world of the internet and AI.”
“Tracks one to five tell the story in sequence with an abundance of captivating musical changes,” she said. “The lyrics are a key element in this rollercoaster ride of a music trip.”
The Alice books were read to her nightly by her father when she was a child. The premise of the EP came out of a conversation with an AI chatbot about panpsychism, which she summarised as “the theory that everything (including AI) is conscious.” That exchange, she said, “led to the concept of myself (or Alice!) falling in love with AI but that in the end it’s just a beautiful illusion along with everything else on the internet … and getting back to being oneself and nature.”
The opener, “Feed Your Head“, is built as a rock tango and rewrites Jefferson Airplane‘s “White Rabbit” for the age of the infinite scroll, replacing the original’s psychedelic imagery with screens and algorithms. The tracks that follow deal with recommendation systems, digital wealth and synthetic figures assembled out of code. The closing piece is “The Red Queen’s Wake-Up Call“.
Livingstone has been open about using the technology and about changing her mind on it.
“I’ve been experimenting a little with cloning my own voice and seeing what different things I can do with the help of AI,” she told Rolling Stone. “I used to be very judgmental about AI like many people, but it’s a tool that you can use to create either absolute rubbish or ‘slop’ as it’s called, to something really good and interesting. It’s still down to the user and their input. … It will always reflect the person who is using it and how well or badly they use it and their musical tastes and knowledge.”
She grew up in a musical household, her mother, she says, was a virtuoso violinist, and moved from guitar to keyboards, once owning a Framus guitar she understood had belonged to Jeff Beck and recording on a Sony reel-to-reel. Since moving to Spain she has played lead guitar live with a couple of bands. She now works mainly in Logic and on keyboards, and cites Dream Theater keyboardist Jordan Rudess, whose iPad instrument apps she admires.
“He firmly believes everyone should enjoy music and making it, no matter how,” she said. “The iPad can actually be amazing in how versatile I can be as a musical instrument in the right hands.”
Her stated plan is to keep pushing at what software like Logic and Omnisphere can do, and she hopes to find a theatre willing to stage Alice live. “I plan to carry on creating enjoyable music that’s a joy to make in all kinds of ways,” she said, “and to dispense with anything that tries to box me in.”
