The 10 most unlikely heavy metal covers of classic songs

In 1985, Megadeth released a landmark thrash metal album, their debut, Killing Is My Business… and Business Is Good! Despite the album being full of songs about Satanism, drugs, serial murder and sex, These Boots, a cover version of the Nancy Sinatra hit (with a fairly explicit lyrical 'reinterpretation') would go on to become its most controversial moment. Some 10 years after it was first released, the song's author Lee Hazlewood called the obviously parodic cover "vile and offensive", and demanded that the song be removed from all future copies of the album.

Ozzy Osbourne may well front Black Sabbath and be partially responsible for inventing heavy metal, but this doesn't mean the dude has always displayed the greatest taste or common sense. Despite the fact that the Bee Gees track Stayin' Alive, from the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, is a copper-bottomed disco banger, The Prince of Darkness, lazily plays his daft version for laughs and turns in a "will this do?" slice of karaoke (with, admittedly, some fun references to his own Crazy Train and Iron Man by The Sabs). And we mean karaoke, quite literally. The track is actually a 1991 Dweezil (son of Frank) Zappa cover that originally featured the equally necro and occult vocalist... Donny Osmond.

Like most thrash metal groups, Anthrax had a real way with covers and have a plethora of unusual ones to choose from including a notorious death metal version of hardcore rap act Public Enemy’s Bring the Noise that features lead vocalist Chuck D. Got the Time is a hectic and caffeinated version of a Joe Jackson new wave album track from 1979, and while it might well be the standout track on Anthrax's 1990 Persistence Of Time LP, it didn’t meet with approval from the actual songwriter. As Jackson told Q magazine in 1991: "[The Anthrax cover] is actually slower than [our version on the Live 1980/86 album]... The way I feel about it is, 'Thanks for the royalties, guys.'"

Hear Anthrax's cover of Joe Jackson's Got the Time

For white America, Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City was the 1978 power ballad that thrust soft-rockers Whitesnake centre stage at the start of their career, and it remains a lighters-aloft mainstay of their live set to this day. However, it was a cover version of an obscure 1974 R&B track by Bobby Bland, in whose hands it was less of a lovelorn lament and more an outright condemnation of black urban poverty. It took a Jay Z recording of the song called In the Heart of a City (Ain't No Love), with Kanye West at the helm, to remind a mainstream audience of what the song's lyrics were actually about.

Watch Whitesnake perform Ain't No Love in the Heart of the City

There are two Marilyn Mansons. One is a genuinely provocative and exciting 21st Century glam rocker whose aesthetic has helped keep goth alive and 'healthy' in America. The other, unfortunately, has his sights set much lower, trying to shock at all costs (as expertly spoofed in this article from The Onion). Unfortunately, it is always the latter, not the former, who selects which songs he's going to cover. These tracks are nearly always British alternative pop songs of the 80s, rendered with pathetic, "he's behind you!", pantomime menace. The thing about the original version of Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This) by Eurythmics is it is already dripping in mystery and alienation, it doesn’t need to be sung as if the vocalist has his nipple ring caught in an elevator door. We wish we could tell you that his versions of Soft Cell, Tubeway Army and Depeche Mode are any better, but trust us, they're not.

Hear Marilyn Manson's cover of Eurythmics's Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)

Children of Bodom - to those who haven't had the pleasure yet - are a melodic death metal band from Helsinki, Finland, who mix extreme technical prowess with crushing heaviness and growled vocals. And they are famed for liking a drink. Which would go some way to explaining this almost transcendentally awful Britney Spears cover… although, to be fair to the band, this track with its drunken swearing (in Finnish), howling laughter, coughing, spitting and Seinfeld-strength slap bass, clearly isn't supposed to be taken too seriously.

It's missing the point saying the G N' R version of Live and Let Die is merely the Wings James Bond song played faithfully but turned all the way up to 11. The glam metallers had got so big, so quickly in the aftermath of Appetite for Destruction, that this bombastic, all-guns-blazing anthem made perfect sense as the set piece of their live sets in 1991, given the size of the arenas they were playing. In fact, the only thing that isn't an exercise in utter maximalism is the cod-reggae middle eight. It begs the question, does Axl Rose even like reggae? If only there were some video evidence that could settle this important question.

Hear Guns N' Roses' cover of Wings' Live and Let Die

In the future, musicological historians will look back at the 1990s phenomenon of fusing heavy metal and rap - nu metal - and surely declare it the low watermark of all Western civilisation. But within this already festering genre does Limp Bizkit's knuckle-dragging, thick-tongued, transcendentally smug and utterly artless cover of George Michael's Faith actually stand out as the worst song ever recorded by human beings? It's either that or Joy Sarney's Naughty Naughty Naughty.

Hear Limp Bizkit's limp cover of George Michael's Faith

To be precise, this slab of hijinks was recorded by Stumpus Maximus & The Good Ol' Boys, which is none other than Sheffield's premier metal band, Def Leppard, fronted by their guitar tech/tour manager Malvin Mortimer. On this B-side of the US version of the single Pour Some Sugar on Me, the band plough through the Engelbert Humperdinck easy-listening classic with what sounds like little in the way of practice or ability. Fiendishly, the band keep on inserting key changes until the raw-throated Mortimer can no longer hit a single note. Despite his inability to carry a tune in a wheelbarrow, it is interesting to note how much this track still towers above Limp Bizkit's Faith in terms of quality and listenability.

There are plenty of extremely valid reasons why musicians should never touch heroin and most are self-evident. One that bears repeating, however, is that it kills creativity and ambition. In the late-80s and early-90s Ministry were redefining what was possible to do in the field of mainstream metal by introducing elements of industrial, dub and techno, until the drugs outstripped the creativity. This insipid, turgid and dirge-like Bob Dylan cover from 1996 represented a crisis in vision and a negative turning point from which the band never really recovered.

Watch the video of Ministry's cover of Bob Dylan's Lay Lady Lay