The Flaming Lips & Modest Mouse’s Isaac Brock Cover Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’

The Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse embarked on a co-headlining tour this past weekend. Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock joined The Flaming Lips in paying tribute to Ozzy Osbourne by covering Black Sabbath’s “War Pigs” at each of the tour’s first three shows.

The Flaming Lips and Modest Mouse started their joint excursion on Friday in Atlanta, followed by shows in Raleigh, North Carolina on August 2 and in Richmond, Virginia on August 3.

Modest Mouse frontman Isaac Brock first surfaced at the start of The Flaming Lips’ encore at the Coca-Cola Roxy in Atlanta. The Flaming Lips frontman spoke to the crowd as Brock retook the stage.

“We feel like you guys came to the show tonight and thought someone tonight was probably going to do something because Ozzy died, right?,” Coyne asked the Atlanta audience. “This is a song that we started to do, gosh, 2006 or something like that. You’re going to know this song. We don’t do the whole song. We do just the parts where you get to sing along. Isaac’s going to help us. You help us as much as you can.”

“I told him I don’t know the words,” Brock interjected.

Coyne also spoke to the audience at Raleigh’s Red Hat Amphitheater before the second “War Pigs” collab with Brock. Draped in the United States of America flag, Coyne stated:

“When my older brothers were in high school, two of their friends were sent off to Vietnam and both of them did not come back. And this song by the group Black Sabbath was – even though they’re from England – it spoke about the frustration and the anger and just how impossible it was to believe that this war could not end and very angry about why this war, this Vietnam War, was going on.

“So that’s why I wear the American flag because these guys and thousands of others have gone off to these horrible wars and I’m one of the very lucky people that though I’m old, I never I never had to go to war. So I’m going to sing about it. And also how much Ozzy Osbourne was one of our freak brothers.

“So we sing this for our brothers who died a long time ago. And we sing this for our brother who just died.”

The anti-war anthem “War Pigs” appeared on Black Sabbath’s 1970 sophomore album, Paranoid. The metal band’s iconic frontman, Ozzy Osbourne, died on July 22 at age 76.

The Flaming Lips and Brock continued linking up for “War Pigs” on the third night of their tour at Brown’s Island in Richmond. Watch audience-captured video footage of the trio of Ozzy tributes below:

The Flaming Lips’ setlists so far on the tour with Modest Mouse have included “Five Stop Mother Superior Rain,” from The Lips’ 1990 album, In A Priest Driven Ambulance. The rarity not played by The Flaming Lips since the mid-1990s was brought back in part due to Modest Mouse having covered the song in recent years.

Watch “Five Stop Mother Superior Rain” performed by The Flaming Lips at The Roxy: