Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [120]
Once MOP had sold more than a million copies worldwide and grazed the UK Top Forty, even the NME, then the bastion of anti-metal prejudice and cultural snobbery, felt obliged to put Metallica on its cover, under the guise of a better-late-than-never ‘investigation’, in which they also took sidelong glances at Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax, under the heading: ‘Breaking the Thrash Barrier’. Inevitably, given the reactionary aspect of the paper’s culture, begun in the 1970s as a commendable desire to disoblige various rock emperors of their new clothes, now curdled in the post-punk 1980s into an unseemly no-right-of-reply one-upmanship, Metallica became accused of purveying music ‘as a manifest form of gay pop’; an approach which Lars combated with an unusually straight face. When questioned on his views of Paris – the city the interview took place in – and that of the broader music scene in general, he commented: ‘I appreciate and understand a lot of the things you’re talking about…but for me and this band my interest is just music. The history of cities and what rappers get up to really takes a fifth fiddle to what we do.’ It was a face-off with no clear winner. Referring to James throughout the article as ‘Jim’, and Cliff as ‘Chris’, hardly endeared the clearly disinterested writer to the even-less-interested band, either.
As ever, Kerrang! led the way for both Metallica and thrash. The album received prime billing and a five-star review, concluding that while Metallica were rightly recognised as thrash metal’s most prominent icons, the new album proved they were now ‘something more, something far greater’. Just weeks before, the magazine had also launched a bi-monthly offshoot, Mega Metal Kerrang!, aimed specifically at the now-flourishing thrash metal market. On the cover of issue one: Metallica. Says editor Geoff Barton, ‘People just tend to think about what they call the Big Four these days – Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth and Anthrax. But by [1986] there were tons and tons and tons of bands all vying for a little piece of the thrash metal pie and we couldn’t really cover them all, to any great extent, within the pages of Kerrang! because there was a bunch of other stuff we needed to do as well. So Mega Metal was launched a hundred per cent as a thrash metal magazine. To cover the big names but also to bring in the relative minnows. Just do a heavier mag than Kerrang!, basically.’
The timing was spot-on. Metallica may have seen the fork in the road and taken it, but those who came after had no such qualms. They just wanted in. Not least Dave Mustaine’s new post-Metallica outfit, Megadeth, whose debut album, Killing is My Business…and Business is Good, had been selling steadily since its initial release on the independent Combat label in September 1985. Containing Dave’s original, much speeded-up version of Metallica’s renamed ‘The Four Horsemen’ – here given back its original title of ‘The Mechanix’ – Mustaine made plain his intention to ‘straighten Metallica up’ and prove that Megadeth, not the band that kicked him out, were the ones to lead the thrash generation. As Mustaine boasted at the time to Bob Nalbandian, ‘I thought I’d have a hell of lot harder time coming up with something better [than Metallica], but this is three times faster, more advanced and a hell of a lot heavier.’ It was certainly a technical masterclass in terms of sheer musicianship, now seen as the probable beginning point for what would later become known as techno-thrash or progressive metal. The songs themselves all reflected Mustaine’s angry, vengeful mindset, missing the twisted humour that would become