WWE superstar Becky Lynch has made no secret of her love for rock music. Her iconic entrance theme, written by CFO$ and titled Celtic Invasion, is a polished folk punk jig filtered through galloping, twin-lead heavy metal, while throwing the horns was a trademark gesture any time she made her way to the ring for much of her early career.
When it comes to her very favourite band, however, the Irish native and multiple-time world champ had a clear and immediate answer when interviewed by Metal Hammer in 2015, when Lynch was still in WWE's developmental branch, NXT.
"I guess I’m a big grunge-head!" she enthused. "Pearl Jam are my favourite band of all time. I’m a big Stone Temple Pilots fan. Mother Love Bone, Soundgarden… my brother always listened to Nirvana when I was younger, so I think that’s what got me started, but then I discovered Pearl Jam, and I was hanging out with other [rock kids] at Temple Bar in Dublin, and there I started getting into all these other bands I’d never heard of. There was Korn, Pantera, Machine Head… From This Day is one of my favourite songs of all time."
Lynch also expressed nostalgia for a long-gone staple of the rock scene that has been largely lost to the sands of time.
“This was back when you and your friends would make tapes," she added. "I thought all that was really good fun. It’s a shame that people don’t do that any more."
Talking about her time in NXT, Lynch suggested that professional wrestling is most exciting when its edgy, boundary-pushing and unafraid to break some rules in the process - much like rock and heavy metal. “It’s not going with the status quo – and that’s metal!" she explained. "It’s not saying, ‘Okay, this is the way it is, you’re going to follow these rules’. It’s saying, ‘No, why am I gonna follow these rules? I’m not gonna follow them, they don’t make sense. I’m gonna be who I am, you’re not gonna tell me what to do’. It’s Rage Against The Machine – another amazing band – that, ‘F-you, I won’t do what you tell me!‘”
Next month, Lynch will step into the ring with another huge rock fan - WWE's resident metalhead and Women's World Champion, Rhea Ripley - at the company's flagship event, Wrestlemania. Whoever comes out of that bout on top, it looks a safe bet that WWE will have someone with excellent taste representing their women's division moving forward.
