Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [14]
Looking back at Lars Ulrich’s arrival in their midst now, almost three decades later, Diamond Head guitarist Brian Tatler still laughs at his young fan’s audacity. ‘He started sending handwritten letters over, saying “I live in [America] and I love all this NWOBHM movement.” Then he must have seen that we were touring in the summer of ’81, the big tour where we were doing the Woolwich Odeon, and he must have bought a ticket and decided to fly over to England and see his favourite band Diamond Head. This was just as a fan; he wouldn’t say he was a drummer or anything. It would be like, “This guy, Lars, from America, has sent another letter.” Then he turned up at the Woolwich Odeon and introduced himself and we were all really impressed because no one had ever flown from [America] to see Diamond Head before. It seemed like an amazing feat. I’d never been to America and he was seventeen, pitched up backstage and introduced himself! We were chuffed. We asked where he was staying and he was like, “I don’t know, I’ve just come straight from the airport,” and I said, “Come stay with me, if you like?” So he jumped in the car with us and we just squeezed him in. After that, Lars used to go everywhere with us,’ including two more Diamond Head shows: one in Leeds, one in Hereford, ‘all squashed up in the back of Sean’s Austin Allegro’.
Lars stayed at Brian’s for a week. The guitarist still lived with his parents and Lars would crash out on Brian’s thinly carpeted bedroom floor, wrapped in his brother’s moth-eaten old sleeping bag. Most nights they would go to the pub for a drink. ‘One night we walked home ’cos we’d missed the bus and got completely soaked,’ Brian recalls. ‘He told me he hadn’t got a spare change of clothes. So I found a pair of me brother’s old yellow flares at the bottom of the wardrobe and he put those on. I probably should have took a picture. He was just a character, you know? Full of beans, full of energy. Full of the enthusiasm for the New Wave of British Heavy Metal.’ When they got home from the pub they would sit together watching a Betamax video Brian had recently procured of the 1974 California Jam – the festival at which a then-unknown vocalist named David Coverdale made his debut American appearance with Deep Purple. Lars ‘loved that’, says Brian; ‘we used to watch that into the early hours. And he used to mime the solos and all that, ’cos he was big into Deep Purple and Blackmore was it.’ Another video favourite was Lynyrd Skynyrd supporting the Stones at Knebworth, which Brian had taped off the TV, Lars rolling around on the floor doing the guitar solo to ‘Freebird’.
I wondered how the teenager had managed financially while he was in England. ‘He’d got loads of money!’ reveals Brian. ‘I think maybe his dad was well off or something. I thought: how come he’s got all this money? He’d got probably a hundred and fifty quid on him or something.’ A substantial figure in 1981. ‘He wanted to buy all these copies of Sounds off me. He hadn’t got ’em and they’d got loads of interesting features about maybe Angel Witch or whatever. He also went to Pinnacle Records, the distributor. I think he just found his way there. He just disappeared one day and said, “I’m going to Pinnacle,” and got on the train and figured it out and came back with, like, a big armful of albums and singles. He’d bought about forty records! And then we’d sit there and play them,