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By Root 428 0

started on Tuesday, 3 September 1985. The band was still jet-lagged and missing its bass player but in every other respect they were in the best shape of their lives. The hectic two and a half years the Ulrich-Hetfield-Burton-Hammett line-up of Metallica had been together had seen it coalesce over more than 140 gigs and two albums into a fist-tight proposition. In the eighteen months since they’d completed Ride the Lightning they had leapt forward as songwriters, as the new material they were now coming up with proved to them. They also had the ironclad confidence only nearly a million albums and singles sold worldwide can bring. ‘There was a sense of [expectation],’ said Kirk. ‘It did feel like we had a huge amount of momentum behind us, people supporting us and pushing us all during the creation of that album…that this album was another big step forward.’ Just to make sure, Lars had recently taken it upon himself to book drum lessons. He had been embarrassed by his amateurish approach in the studio the first time he’d worked with Rasmussen; he was going to show the producer how different things were now. Kirk, too, although always a conscientious pupil, had been away from home a long time and the summer of 1985 was his first prolonged spell back working with Joe Satriani – himself now about to embark on a recording career – since before he’d joined Metallica.

No more sleeping in the spare room, either. With Elektra now paying the bills the band could afford to book into the luxury Scandinavia Hotel, where Lars and James shared a junior suite and Kirk and Cliff shared another. ‘It just made the stay a lot easier for [the other three],’ said Lars. ‘We thought we were just on top of the world!’ laughed Kirk. Even Cliff, who arrived at the start of the second week there, began to settle down and enjoy the surroundings. As winter arrived and the nights got longer and colder, away from the studio, with their guitars and a plentiful supply of strong black hash, Cliff and Kirk ignored the snow on the ground outside and turned their room at the Scandinavia into a home from home. ‘For a bass player he played a lot of guitar,’ Kirk recalled. ‘In fact, he would drive me crazy with it. We’d come back to the hotel after a night of gallivanting, like totally wasted at three in the morning or whatever. But instead of crashing out he would immediately want to set up the electric guitars and start playing for a couple of hours. I’d be exhausted but then I’d totally get sucked into it and start playing along with him. He would talk me into figuring out certain guitar parts of certain songs so that I could show them to him. Eventually that led to figuring out guitar solos so that he could play them on guitar. He was obsessed with Ed King, one of the guitar players in Lynyrd Skynyrd. He said that Ed King was his favourite guitar player, which was pretty weird.’

When they weren’t playing guitars together, they were playing poker. ‘We’d go out and play poker for eight hours straight after being up for twenty-four hours,’ said Kirk. ‘We’d find a seafood restaurant that was open, eat raw oysters and drink beer, scream at the natives while we were drunk.’ They were, he said, ‘some of my best memories’ from that time. James and Lars were also hanging out more again. As on their previous visits to Denmark, when they weren’t working the two liked to get stuck into the Elephant beer. Recalled Lars, ‘In late November, early December, they have something called Christmas beers, which is just an excuse for everyone to drink their Christmas sorrows away. It’s twice as strong as regular beer. Every time we went out and drank these Christmas beers, James would start trying to talk Danish – completely pissed out of his face!’

Once they were inside Sweet Silence every night, however, it was all business. Far from merely carrying on where they’d left off with RTL, the new album would be something else again, they decided – beginning with the sound quality. I put it to Rasmussen that, listening back now, it’s as though they had made some giant breakthrough