Rihanna’s live guitarist disputes rumours she wanted to make a heavy metal album

nme.com:

Rihanna‘s live guitarist Nuno Bettencourt has shot down a long-standing rumour that the singer wanted to make a heavy metal album.Back in 2009, The Daily Star reported as an exclusive that “closet rock chick” Rihanna was “desperate to go all heavy metal”, but her record label “had a seizure” over her hopes for a change in musical direction.They quoted Bettencourt saying: “When I spoke to Rihanna she was totally into transforming herself into a heavy rock chick.

She was listening to Led Zeppelin and new acts like Paramore and said that was the direction she wanted to go, so I said yes.”However, in a new interview with Classic Rock, Bettencourt denied that he’d made any of the comments in the 2009 article.“That’s complete lies,” he said “that’s fabricated.

It’s so incorrect. I promise you on the life of my children that those words never came out of my mouth. It’s a good story, which is why it got written I guess, but it’s absolutely not true.” [via LouderSound]“What happened was that they got in touch with me because they said they wanted a guitar player, and wanted to rock out the show, and they had seen some of my stuff online.

I said, Why would you want me, there’s no guitar on a lot of the songs? And I was told, that they just wanted me to be me, and do it on ‘Umbrella’ and everything, with heavy chords and riffs.