Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [102]
Ultimately, though, the separation was ‘not very fun’. Indeed, three years later, as a guest at Jonny and Marsha’s home, I would sit and listen to him semi-jokingly describe Q Prime as ‘Thieves! Fuckin’ thieves!’ When I remind him of it now, he sighs and says: ‘Can I tell you something, they probably are. What they did was probably thieve-ish. But the band probably came to them complaining and moaning and asking for a saviour, to get to the next level. Lars, you remember, always, always wanted to be in the same league as Def Leppard. He felt that if he had Def Leppard’s manager, it’s possible. And again, I was not proven in the arena level, in those days. Marsha and I had not done any giant venues – and they wanted to be where that knowledge was guaranteed to exist.’ He is not allowed to ‘discuss the terms’ because of the confidentiality clause in his eventual written agreement with Metallica. ‘But I’ll see if I can put it to you in a mild way. We were asked, legally…to negotiate a separation.’ Another deep sigh. ‘You know, if it ain’t right, you can’t manage a band. You don’t want to be hated. I want to be loved! So it would have been punishment for us also to have gone on. It was a surprise but I can’t say anything [except] I felt the history would have been the same or maybe even better with me and Marsha.’
We would never know.
Seven
Masterpiece
I sat on the corner of the bed in my hotel room, watching Gem go at it.
He’d taken a picture from the wall, laid it flat on the coffee table and was chopping out lines of coke on it.
‘There are two things I’d rather you didn’t bring up to the band,’ he said.
‘Yeah, what’s that?’
‘One is this whole thrash thing. They’re really sensitive suddenly about being called thrash. They feel like they’ve gone beyond all that now and that this new album is something different.’
‘Okay,’ I said. No biggie. It had been the same during the punk thing. I’d lost count of the amount of bands I’d interviewed in my early days on Sounds that no longer wished to be labelled simply as ‘punk’. ‘New wave’ was the desirable new sobriquet for the would-be pop intelligentsia and so that’s what you wrote – if you wanted to stay in with them. It was the same with all the old NWOBHM bands. By the time I’d started writing about Iron Maiden and Def Leppard for Kerrang! it would never have occurred to me to describe them as NWOBHM. That stuff was good for getting known in the early days but turned into a pain in the arse once it came to second or third album time. The novelty had worn off and everybody was desperate to distance themselves from it. No one still described Pink Floyd as psychedelic, did they? Or The Beatles as Merseybeat or mop-tops, God forbid.
‘What’s the second thing?’ I asked, eyeing the coke impatiently.
‘Er, this,’ he said, handing me a rolled-up pound note.
I snaffled up a couple of fat ones then sat back, fighting the welling nausea as the stuff trickled down my throat.
‘Why…They don’t like coke?’
‘Oh, they like it all right. A bit too fucking much! No, if they find out I’ve got this they’ll do it all and there’ll be none left for us.’
‘Fuck that,’ I said.
‘Too right…’
We sat there a couple more hours, doing our thing, getting ready to go to the studio and see the band. I liked Gem. He was old-school, knew how to get the party started. The band was lucky to have him. And now they would have me, too. Not a thrash writer but a proper mainstream music critic here to bestow his blessings – or something. That was certainly the spiel I’d been on the receiving end of when I’d been invited to fly to Copenhagen to check out their new album, Master of Puppets. ‘It’s different this time,’ I kept being told. ‘This is the one that’s going to break them into the mainstream.’
I nodded dutifully then waited for the plane tickets to arrive. I didn’t give a toss about who was breaking into the mainstream. I just