• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 514 0

The band was not. Indeed, over the coming years they would make a virtue out of their apparent refusal to make, as Lars put it, ‘suck-ass fucking videos like all the other lame rock bands’. Yet this was an attitude born not of rebellious fortitude but the shrewd micro-calculations for which Ulrich would become far more famous in the American music industry than his drumming. As Lars later told me, back in the 1980s, when MTV was a solitary cable channel, as opposed to the multi-strand, globe-straddling goliath it is today, lording it over dozens of lookalike satellite music TV channels, he and Peter and Cliff at Q Prime had weighed up the various pros and cons of making a video. Star pupil that he was, Lars already had the answer. ‘We figured, they’re not gonna show a fucking Metallica video anyway. Why waste money making one then? We knew we’d get more publicity out of not making a video than making one.’

And so it proved. An interesting stance to take for a band whose new album would be loosely themed around the subjects of manipulation and control; the puppet master and his expertise at twanging the right strings; making the right moves. The album sleeve reflected this idea almost too perfectly: a field of white crosses – inspired subconsciously perhaps by the penultimate scene from Hetfield’s beloved The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, where Tuco Ramirez frenziedly scavenges for gold among a field of white gravestones – under a glowering hell-red sky from which hovers the Metallica logo, above which can be seen the puppet master’s hands, tugging at the strings attached to the crosses below. In fact, the image could be looked at in a number of ways, not least as a more direct reflection of the title song’s pointed reference to drug addiction (‘chopping your breakfast on a mirror’), the puppet strings those of the dealer’s, the white crosses those of his doomed clientele, the already brain-dead.

But it’s that more overpowering and deeply cynical image of the semi-visible forces of manipulation and control that really unsettles and eventually takes lasting root. Especially from this distance, a quarter of a century later, knowing what came next…

Part Two

The Art Of Darkness

‘How could he know this new dawn’s light would change his life forever? Set sail to sea, but pulled off course by the light of golden treasure…’

– James Hetfield, ‘The Unforgiven III’, 2008

Eight

Come, Sweet Death

It must have been ten years later. So far into the future the past was another planet. I was walking the dog around the park one day in the wind and the rain. I was in my usual dog-walking gear: old jeans I didn’t mind getting torn or muddy, steel-toe-capped walking boots, several layers of T-shirts and sweaters, and the old leather Metallica jacket. Working on Kerrang! in the Eighties you’d get given a lot of stuff like that: band T-shirts, bomber jackets, baseball caps. All with the name of whatever band it was emblazoned across the front and the tour dates scrawled down the back. Hideous things you wouldn’t be seen dead in, most of them. There were exceptions, though. The occasional shirt that didn’t draw disdainful looks from passing females, or start fights in pubs full of beered-up lads.

The Metallica jacket was one of those. A heavy-duty, black leather replica of the classic American biker jacket; no tour dates to disfigure it; no gaudy pictures of muscle-bound monster-men brandishing swords, or scantily clad babes delightedly straddling dragons. The sort of jacket you could wear without embarrassing yourself. Except this was ten years later maybe and it was so worn and battered and encrusted with dirt and dog saliva that you could only just about make out the word ‘Metallica’ in miniature on the left breast pocket, and beneath that three more: ‘Master of Puppets’. The only other signifier of the jacket’s origins was the small hand-stitched cartoon skull that adorned the wrist of the left sleeve, now so caked in dried mud and threadbare you’d never have noticed it, unless you knew what you were looking for.

London