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By Root 399 0

image: shin-length shorts, gaudy, comic-book hero T-shirts, backwards-flipped baseball caps. It was a look and a sound – a whole new, much more East Coast-centric attitude – that would fully come to fruition on their next album, Among the Living, and attendant UK hit single, the Judge Dredd-inspired ‘I Am the Law’ (despite being banned by BBC radio, who blanched at the line: ‘I am the law / You won’t fuck around no more’). To their everlasting credit, Anthrax would also become the first thrash-generation metal band to embrace the rapidly rising hip hop scene, taking the breakthrough moves made by Aerosmith and Run DMC on ‘Walk This Way’ one step further with their own seminal rap-metal classic ‘I’m the Man’. ‘Just because we like metal it don’t mean our eyes are closed,’ Scott Ian told me. By then Jonny and Marsha Z, who unlike Metallica, the band had kept as managers, had signed them to Island Records, Jonny flattering Island chief Chris Blackwell: ‘You didn’t get Metallica, but this thing is tremendous, and it’s too heavy for any [other] label. Only a rebel like you…’

Although they continued to be lumped in together in the media, from here on in, thrash’s Big Four would take their own very different paths, while still attracting an overlapping audience. The hardcore thrashers would stay with Slayer. ‘We heard Master of Puppets and me and my friends didn’t really like it, to be frank,’ recalls Machine Head frontman Robb Flynn. ‘We were wanting thrash songs, and we got a couple. But there was also acoustics and lots of harmonies, and we were like, “Whoa, what’s this? I’m not cool with this,” and [we] kind of abandoned Metallica. I can’t even tell you how many times I’ve gone back to that record in my life since but at the time we were sixteen. I was worshipping Reign in Blood, and other bands had come along that were faster and heavier and maybe scarier.’ Malcolm Dome concurs: ‘People were now starting to look at Metallica as significant, rather than just really good. Their career was going places. They’d outgrown thrash and there was very much a sense that [Master] was an important record. It was a leap forward for Metallica and one of the most crucial records of the era for metal. Metallica were now discussed in the same context as, say, Iron Maiden, much more mainstream, and Slayer had become the kings of thrash.’ Even Xavier Russell, who had done so much to spread the Metallica message early on, now switched his critical allegiance to Slayer, describing Reign in Blood as ‘such a defining moment’ for the development of thrash, ‘mainly because of the production. Metallica’s [early] albums had always suffered slightly on the production. But when I heard Reign in Blood, I said, “Sorry Lars, but this is the dog’s bollocks, mate.”’

James Hetfield did not agree, putting up a spirited defence of Metallica’s attitude in a typically thrash-curious article in the otherwise utterly indifferent i-D magazine. ‘When people first started copying us it was a real compliment, but now we have to get away from the speed metal tag, ’cos all these bands have jumped on the bandwagon. The NWOBHM bands each had their own sound and feeling, but you can’t tell the difference between most of the new thrash bands. It’s fucked. So you’re the fastest band in the world…so what? Your songs suck.’ Speaking to me around the same time, Lars went further, insisting the very reason Master of Puppets got so much attention was entirely based on the fact that it wasn’t a thrash album. ‘We wanted to make an album that left all that scene behind; something we took time over and gave our best shot. Not something with a label.’ Interestingly, Gary Holt of Exodus, one of the bands Metallica was now being unfavourably compared to by hardcore thrash fans, says he agreed. It wasn’t to do with who was the baddest thrash outfit, he says, it was simply down to the songs: ‘Metallica made, in my opinion, probably the greatest metal album of all time in Master of Puppets. I don’t even want to call it a thrash album, even though it’s got plenty of that. It’s just a great,