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note); and of course their old friends war (‘Disposable Heroes’) and death (‘Damage, Inc.’) – both instant thrash classics, performed at psychotic speed, the fastest, all-out headbangers on an album that, ironically, signalled the band’s fond farewell to thrash. With its woozy intro utilising a range of harmonies, volume swells and effects, ‘Damage, Inc.’ was also Metallica’s metaphorical adieu, perhaps, to their early innocence, as they eagerly awaited the rewards and trappings of major stardom, which – although they still didn’t talk about in places where they might be overheard – they were all now anticipating with varying degrees of feverish delight. Hetfield spelling it out in the lyrics: ‘We chew and spit you out / We laugh, you scream and shout…’

Seen as a whole, Master of Puppets was in many ways merely a new, vastly improved version of Ride the Lightning. Certainly the track sequencing followed the template almost to the letter, beginning with the atmospheric acoustic guitar intro before segueing into the super-fast, ultra-heavy opening track, ‘Battery’ – in reference to their days playing the Old Waldorf club on San Francisco’s Battery Street; a nasty collision between punk and metal that made no apologies to either rigidly defined culture. There followed the monumentally epic title track; swaggering death march – ‘The Thing That Should Not Be’ (like ‘The Call of Ktulu’, inspired by H.P. Lovecraft, its lyric ‘Not dead which eternal lie / Stranger eons death may lie’ the same paraphrased quote that also appeared on the cover of Iron Maiden’s Live After Death, bought by Lars during their stay in Copenhagen). Then there was the spooky demi-ballad, ‘Welcome Home…’ and so on up to and including the by-now-obligatory eight-minute-plus, bass-led Burton instrumental, ‘Orion’; the small white dot in the ocean of black the band veils the rest of the album in, yin to its yang, Cliff’s solo seeping in so seamlessly it’s unclear where the guitar fades out and the bass takes over. Nevertheless, the total track-for-track effect of Master was a quantum leap on from anything Metallica had achieved on Ride, and while these days both albums tend to be mentioned in the same breath, historically, where the former was Metallica’s first exceptionally accomplished recording, the latter would swiftly become recognised as their first stone-cold masterpiece; their Led Zeppelin II; their Ziggy Stardust; their legacy. There would never be a Metallica album quite like it again.

‘It was like we’d got it right this time,’ Kirk told me. ‘The cohesiveness from song to song, track to track, made perfect sense to us. It was almost as if it was self-creating. Ideas were just flowing and coming out of nowhere. From the beginning, when we first started writing, all the way to the end, it just seemed as though there was a non-stop flow of really, really great ideas. It was almost magical because it seemed like everything we played went right, every note we played was in exactly the right spot, and it couldn’t ever have gone any better. It was a very, very, very special time. I remember holding the album in my hands and thinking, “Wow, this is a fucking great album, even if it doesn’t sell anything. It doesn’t matter because this is such a great musical statement that we’ve just created.” I really felt that it would pass the test of time. Which it has…’

Certainly there was a sense of occasion to proceedings when I visited the band at Sweet Silence a week before Christmas 1985. Still fretting over the final mixes, the only track they would play me with all the vocals was ‘Master of Puppets’ itself; an astonishing experience I was completely unprepared for. I had been expecting first-rate heavy metal. Instead I got Sturm und Drang, the giant studio speakers veritably shaking as the maelstrom of drums and guitars came roaring volcanically from their cones. Cliff was standing next to me on one side, Lars on the other, nodding along; Cliff’s eyes closed in deep concentration, Lars the opposite, his eyes almost popping out of his head, sneaking sideways