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and tell us what kind of clothes to wear or what kind of notes to play. They didn’t have any interest in that at all. They just wanted to manage bands that had something to say. Bands that had a destiny, I guess, you’d say.’ As for the individuals, ‘Peter and Cliff are true gentlemen. I have the utmost respect for both of them. They both have strengths in different areas and they were wise enough to recognise what each of them did well and allow each other to pursue those interests. Peter was always much more in control of the touring aspect and road life. Cliff was more into diplomacy and talking. Any issues within the band, he would be the one that would come and talk to everybody and kind of reason things out. Peter was kind of like the big stick; he would come in and bash people over the head.’

Be that as it may, Michael Alago insists now that he was already speaking to Jonny Z about signing Metallica ‘long before Q Prime’s involvement’, denying that Mensch and Burnstein had any direct influence on his decision. ‘At the time they were being handled by the Zazulas and not Q Prime. For me it was all about the band and their dedication to the music.’ It just so happened that ‘Q Prime were scouting them out the same time I signed them’. But as Jonny Z points out, it was Q Prime who ‘closed the deal’. Consequently, Jonny now believes that while he was involved in preliminary discussions with Alago, Mensch and Burnstein had probably been talking to Alago’s superior, Tom Zutaut. ‘The deal was, basically, in conversation. Then [Q Prime] came in and closed it. They may have closed it from the top while we were working from the bottom up.’ However it worked, the fact remains that by the time Metallica were ready to put pen to paper on an eight-album deal with Elektra in New York, they were no longer being managed by CraZed Management. Jonny says Marsha already had an inkling something was up, suspicious over the number of phone calls Lars would suddenly have to take from ‘Aunt Jane’. Jonny chuckles ruefully, ‘Marsha was telling me they kept calling Aunt Jane. Aunt Jane I think was Peter or Cliff. “I have to call Aunt Jane.” We think that. But who knows?’

For Lars Ulrich, though, it wasn’t about ditching Jonny and Marsha. They had ‘always been good people’. But ‘if we were to go next-level’ they would have to take drastic steps, as they had previously with Ron and with Dave, and as they would again in the future when it came to others in their rapidly expanding organisation. For Lars, meeting Peter Mensch was like finding the final piece of the jigsaw, or being introduced to the bigger, smarter, older brother he never knew he had. Despite their outward differences – Lars the garrulous young hell-raiser to Mensch’s scowling party-pooper – beneath their seemingly uncomplementary façades lay two strikingly similar egos.

Both men were hugely driven, insanely ambitious overachievers, always on the clock, never able to switch off, never wanting to. Almost immediately after they started working together, Lars looked up to Peter, trusted his instincts completely, knew he was the right man for the job. By the same token, Mensch was savvy enough to see past the beers and the laughs, to grasp instantly that here was someone as determined as he to get to the top, and that it would be a good fit: Lars the smiling frontman, charming the pants off everyone he met; Mensch the enforcer standing at his side, making sure everyone paid attention and took this shit seriously.

‘Interesting’ is the tactful way Martin Hooker now describes his dealings with Mensch, subsequent to his takeover of Metallica: ‘He was hard work, I have to say.’ Gem Howard is less guarded. Working with Metallica’s new American managers ‘was weird. Peter Mensch seems to have not really much respect for anybody and the only time I met Cliff Burnstein, when we had a meeting with him…they actually treated us with contempt, really. The only thing Burnstein was interested in was trying to find a Metallica sweatshirt that fitted him. That’s all I remember of him.’ Others share