Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [119]
I looked at him fearfully. The only time strangers without dogs themselves approached you in the park it was never good news. I waited to hear what the problem was but he just carried on moving towards me, smiling.
‘Hey,’ he said, ‘cool band.’
‘What?’
‘Where’d you get it?’
‘What?’
He nodded at the jacket. The penny dropped.
‘Oh,’ I said. ‘Oh…someone gave it to me.’
‘Wow,’ he said. ‘Someone must love you very much.’
I didn’t know where this was going, thought he might be cool, might be psycho.
‘Wanna sell it?’ he said.
‘What?’
‘I’ll give you a thousand pounds.’
I looked at him. Was he serious? A thousand pounds…
He laughed. ‘Only kidding,’ he said. ‘Had you going for a minute, though, eh?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, feeling foolish.
‘Like you’d ever sell something like that,’ he said.
‘Yeah…’
‘Not even for a thousand pounds, eh?’
‘Oh…no…’
He walked off one way, still smiling. I walked off the other, the rain following me and the dog all the way home again.
The morning Master of Puppets was released in Britain, Martin Hooker walked from the MFN office in Carnaby Street across towards Wardour Street and into St Anne’s Court, where Shades was situated. He was shocked by what he found. ‘The kids were queueing outside all the way through the streets of Soho. They’d already got all of the albums in bags with a receipt piled up next to the till, floor to ceiling. It was something that will live with me for ever because it was like, “Holy crap!”’
The release of Master of Puppets in March 1986 brought both Metallica and thrash fully into the mainstream for the first time. Although it would quickly come to represent the end of Metallica’s association with the genre for those fans already in thrall to its snake-belly charms, the success of the album gave thrash a name and a face the rest of the previously disinterested rock audience could at last identify with. As with David Bowie and glam, the Sex Pistols and punk, or Iron Maiden and the NWOBHM, for the vast majority of music buyers uninterested in the sordid details, at least they knew what thrash was now, what it looked like, even what it sounded like. Thrash was Metallica. And, just as with Bowie and glam and Rotten and punk, however much Metallica moved over the coming years to disassociate themselves from their perceived roots, to push their music into newer, more interesting shapes, their calling card would always remain as the ‘godfathers of thrash’. Inventors of a musical legacy that now had more to do with the bands that came after them, it was the tag that both legitimised and ghettoised Metallica – a fact they would spend the rest of their career both railing against and, when it suited them, using as proof of their enduring grass-roots credibility.
On every level, though, Master of Puppets was a game-changer. One of the two best albums they would make, it remains, a quarter of a century later, the symbol of everything that continues to make Metallica interesting and exciting, the fact that they later moved so far away from its look and sound that they might have become another band entirely only further enhancing its occult appeal down through the generations, a momentous release seen now, justifiably so, as an utterly unrepeatable chapter in both their own story and that of rock itself.
In Sounds, under the heading ‘Thrash on Delivery’, the new album was hailed as ‘a synthesis of everything good and truly Metallica…the slow, the fast, the melodic, topped with that exquisite Metallica guitar sound, all treble and grit’. Lars, though, was again doing his best to waylay the inevitable thrash backlash