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By Root 420 0

a stiff reputation for itself as a non-glam, walk-it-like-you-talk-it street metal outfit unprepared to bow to commercial pressures. But to the rest of the industry the subtext was clear: the pictures for the cover and inside story were taken by Ross Halfin, Kerrang!’s number one photographer, the story written by the magazine’s deputy editor, Dante Bonutto – both close personal contacts of Peter Mensch, flown to San Francisco to hang out with the band at El Cerrito. ‘I thought: how have they managed that? ’Cos Diamond Head never made the front cover of Kerrang!,’ says Brian Tatler, laughter tinged with envy. ‘The only reason he’s got that, I thought to meself, is ’cos he’s said, “Yeah, you can spray me, I’ll do whatever you like to get on that front cover.” Whereas Diamond Head would probably have been a little more, “We’re not doing that! I’m not gonna be made to look silly.”’

Far from being silly, as far as the band’s new set-up was concerned, it was another giant leap forward. ‘Getting your band on the cover of Kerrang! meant you immediately sold more records,’ shrugs Gem Howard. Everyone who had ever shown support for Metallica in Britain was invited along to the Lyceum – also billed as a special Christmas show – headed by Bonutto, Xavier Russell and the rest of the Kerrang! team. Writer Malcolm Dome recalls being invited to listen through a headset to what Cliff Burton was playing onstage. ‘It was surreal. I mean, he was doing what he needed to do to keep the beat and so forth, but the rest of his playing didn’t seem to fit what the others were doing at all, as though he was in a world of his own. It was absolutely extraordinary.’ Questioned later by Harald O about his more spontaneous approach to playing live, Cliff shrugged it off with a smile. ‘Yeah, well, you get so you know the song like the back of your hand and you can just flip off and do different stuff. It’s funner that way, it keeps me entertained. You know; something to do.’ Sure, Cliff.

After a break back home in San Francisco – Lars resisting the urge to spend the holidays at home with his family, as Cliff and Kirk would do, in order to keep James company at El Cerrito – the first three months of 1985 found Metallica on their first extended run of US dates for over a year. Second on a three-band bill headlined by W.A.S.P., and opened by old buddies – and now fellow Q Prime clients – Armored Saint, the tour officially got under way on 11 January with a packed show at the Skyway club in Scotia, New York. It was the start of the band’s longest tour yet: forty-eight shows in sixty-eight days that would establish them as the hottest new street-level band in the USA. Closest rivals Grim Reaper – the last of the NWOBHM-generation bands to get a foothold in America – had sold over 150,000 copies of their debut album, See You in Hell (released in the USA at the same time as RTL on the independent Ebony Records label, distributed by RCA). But that would be their peak. Slayer’s debut Show No Mercy had notched up 40,000 US sales in 1984, enough to become Brian Slagel and Metal Blade’s biggest hit yet but not enough to touch what Metallica was now achieving. (Anthrax and Megadeth would not release their first significant albums until much later in 1985). By the time Metallica’s US tour had climaxed with a headline show at the Palladium in Hollywood on 10 March, Elektra had added another 100,000 sales to the 75,000 Megaforce had already done in the USA, the album reaching Number 100 on the Billboard chart. In the UK, meanwhile, the album had gone silver for over 60,000 sales; double then treble that figure across Europe. They were also now making inroads into the lucrative Japanese market, where Q Prime had set up a deal with CBS (soon to become Sony). It had cost a great deal of money to get to this position – on tour support, on advertising and promotion, on recording costs and simply keeping them fed and out of trouble – and they certainly weren’t in the position yet where they could look forward to significant royalties. Indeed, when they were home Cliff was