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By Root 368 0

liked Lars, who’d I’d met at Donington back in the summer. A right laugh. I’d watched his band struggling to drape their dark musical backdrop across the unfeasibly sunlit stage, while doing their best to avoid the bottles and catcalls, the usual drunken Donington crowd detritus. Then later that night, back at the hotel, wasted in the bar, Lars had pointed to the unconscious figure of Venom singer Cronos, slumped at a nearby table, face down in a sea of pint glasses, and suggested we get our pictures taken with him. We stood there sniggering while the magazine photographer aimed his lens, waggling our willies in Cronos’ slumbering ears.

Now this, waiting to go to the studio to hear what Metallica had been up to in the studio all these months later. It hadn’t really dawned on me yet that they might be a band to take very seriously. They were thrash metal; the musical equivalent of silly drunken boys sticking willies in your ear and I had been there many times before. Surely by now we must have seen it all, I thought…

Suddenly, in the autumn of 1984, everything changed for Metallica. Under their agreement with Elektra, Megaforce would hand over US rights to Ride the Lightning after 75,000 sales. The way the album was already flying out the door, Elektra prepared to rerelease it in November, by which time it would already have sold twice as many copies as Kill ’Em All. Although Jonny and Marsha were ‘heartbroken’ to say goodbye to the band, the Elektra deal did help Megaforce stay afloat at a time when they were still struggling with near-crippling debt. As Jonny says now, ‘Our prize for breaking Metallica was losing them. But by the end people were swarming to see them.’ The Elektra money he ‘put into Anthrax and Raven’.

In the UK, Martin Hooker of Music for Nations was also disappointed to see the band go, but in his case the new deal worked more heavily in his favour. ‘[Megaforce] sold the band to Elektra for America. So Elektra were getting the rights to that album [Ride the Lightning] that we’d paid for. In return they very kindly gave us [the next Metallica album] Master of Puppets for free. We still had to pay the band a very handsome advance but we didn’t have to pay any of the recording costs; which was fair because we’d paid for the previous album.’ It also meant ‘somebody else had the hassle of the studio side, overseeing it’. In the meantime, MFN could continue marketing Metallica records with impunity – something that they took spectacular advantage of during the latter months of 1984 when they released a twelve-inch EP of ‘Creeping Death’. The B-side comprised newly minted versions of two NWOBHM classics – Diamond Head’s ‘Am I Evil?’ and Blitzkrieg’s ‘Blitzkrieg’ – from their days in Ron McGovney’s garage. Hence the informal title they gave the single’s cover versions, ‘Garage Days Revisited’.

Gem Howard recalls that sales in the UK and Europe ‘were just phenomenal on that. I think in the end we sold something like a quarter of a million copies, all told.’ It wasn’t just the content that sold the single – Diamond Head singer Sean Harris later recalled being nonplussed when Peter Mensch called for copyright permission to use ‘Am I Evil?’: ‘I was like, “Well, I can’t see the point, but yes you’re welcome to!”’ – it was the ingenious way MFN marketed the record. Tapping into his previous experience at Secret of selling multi-format ‘limited edition’ singles and EPs to the hardcore collector punk audience, Hooker shrewdly released ‘Creeping Death’ in a special coloured-vinyl edition. In America, where Elektra had elected not to release a single, MFN sold more than 40,000 copies of the ‘Creeping Death’ twelve-inch just on import. When orders began to outstrip their ability to manufacture more, MFN simply improvised and released it in a different colour. Recalls Gem, ‘We pressed [“Creeping Death”] on every colour vinyl we could find. We’d get a phone call from an importer in New York saying could [they] have another three thousand coloured-vinyl after we’d decided to put it out in blue or something. I went, “Yeah,