Husband-and-wife schlager duo Cindy & Bert made arguably the best rock cover of all time with their reimagined version of Black Sabbath’s Paranoid… in German.

Mysteriously retitled The Hound Of The Baskervilles, it’s got a completely different lyric that has nothing whatsoever to do with the original. Sung in their native German, it rocks every bit as much as Sabbath, with additional psychedelic organ flourishes and a guitar solo of which Tony Iommi would be proud.

Cindy und Bert are/were Jutta Gusenburger and Norbert Berger, and they came to brief international attention when they represented Germany in the 1974 Eurovision Song Contest – though they have subsequently acquired cult status for this recording from 1971.

Their most successful songs were Immer Wieder Sonntags (1973), Spaniens Guitars and Aber Am Abend Da Gypsy (both 1974) – though this is surely their most notorious. So who were they?

Bert came from a family of musicians: his father and grandfather were both church organists in his local Catholic church of St Eligius in Völklingen. In the early Sixties, Norbert played bass in an amateur band called Blue Birds and when they advertised for a vocalist they were joined by a student called Jutta.

They then became a quintet performing as Jutta & The Royal but slimmed down to the duo Cindy & Bert in 1965 and married two years later, by which time Cindy was working as an insurance clerk and Bert as an industrial clerk (whatever that is).

Their first record, Saturday Morning, was a hit in Germany in 1969 and after giving up their day jobs they had eight hit singles on the German chart between 1972 and 1975, the biggest being Immer Wieder Sonntags.

Cindy & Bert’s first attempt to represent Germany at Eurovision came in 1972, when Geh’ Die Straße finished in second place in the national selection. The following year they performed two songs in the final, but could only manage eighth and ninth place.

It was third time lucky in 1974 when their song Die Sommermelodie was chosen as the country’s entry for the 19th Eurovision Song Contest, held in Brighton. Unfortunately for them, they were up against Abba and met their Waterloo… finishing in equal bottom place.

Undaunted, they had a fourth crack at representing Germany in 1978 with another two songs, but neither was selected for Eurovision.

Cindy & Bert recorded together until the late 1980s when the couple divorced and Cindy launched a solo career, trying twice more for Eurovision without success, reuniting in the mid-Nineties to sing their old hits and even recording some new ones.

Evidently addicted to the limelight, Cindy & Bert spent a week living together in the Big Brother house in 2006, and five years later they took part in a TV talent show called Cover My Song, on which a rapper called Favorite covering one of their old hits.

Sadly, Bert died in Düsseldorf in 2012 after contracting pneumonia; two years later Cindy took part in the German version of Strictly and now lives in Berlin.