At this year’s Bloodstock Open Air festival in the United Kingdom, MASTODON‘s Brann Dailor and Bill Kelliher took some time out with Bloodstock TV host Oran O’Beirne to talk about their experience performing at the “Back To The Beginning” event, celebrating the life of Ozzy Osbourne and BLACK SABBATH. Asked if they knew about the concert far in advance, Brann said: “It was probably about six months, I think, before it took place. Maybe there was an original six bands that got chosen or whatever before some other bands got added later. And so we got an e-mail asking about it, if we were interested. And at first it was, like, ‘Are you sure? Are you sure you don’t have the wrong people or something?’ Our manager actually joked that it was the fastest reply that they had ever gotten from us collectively.” Bill quipped: “We replied, like, I think 0.10 seconds before they actually asked us to do it. We had already replied ‘yes.'”

Brann went on to say that it was “the honor of a lifetime” to be asked to perform at “Back To The Beginning”. “It’s better than a Grammy,” he said. “It’s better than anything that anybody could ever bestow upon you to be called upon by the giant oak tree that is BLACK SABBATH. In other genres of music, the founders, they’re not alive. So it was really, really an incredible honor just to picked to do it. And, yeah, so then it was the arduous task of picking the (SABBATH) song (to play at the event).”

Regarding how MASTODON ended up choosing “Supernaut” to play at “Back To The Beginning”, Bill said: “‘Supernaut’, I’ve loved that song. I mean, all their songs are great, but that one I couldn’t imagine coming to practice one day as (SABBATH guitarist) Tony Iommi and saying, ‘I’ve got a good riff, man. You guys wanna see what I’ve got’, and playing that riff, and just being like… You must have sold your soul to learn that riff. The devil gave you that riff. So to see that it wasn’t chosen yet was — ‘That’s the one. Let’s do that.'”

Added Brann: “So, obviously, there was the songs that SABBATH themselves were gonna do. And so they were doing their biggest hits and their biggest songs. Initially I wanted to do ‘Children Of The Grave’ just ’cause our band, we live in 6/8 (tempo), that heavy metal shuffle that that ‘Children Of The Grave’ invented for us. We have a lot of songs that are in that; that’s a very, very comfortable wheelhouse for us. But I saw LAMB OF GOD had already picked that, which I figured it would be scooped up — that one — pretty quickly, being such an amazing song. But then we saw ‘Supernaut’ was available, and I was, like, ‘What about ‘Supernaut’?’ I felt like I could sing it, so it was kind of gonna kind of maybe come down to that, if I could pull it off, playing drums and singing it. And then when we got picked to open, I was, like, ‘Man, I think if we crush this, it’s gonna be the perfect opening kind of song.’ It’s a high-energy one. Some of the doomier ones might have been a little too slow to really kick things off. But this was the perfect one, I think.”

Asked if MASTODON has recorded a studio version of “Supernaut”, Bill said: “Not yet, but we’ve been talking about it, for sure. We have to. We’ve been playing it every night. We’ve recorded it a few times live, and it’s come out… Who knows? Maybe we’ll do a live version, do a studio version.” Brann added: “We’re definitely recording it.”