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followed by a short US and Canadian tour at the end of November, before finally returning to Europe – the scene of the crime – at the start of 1987 to finish up the dates they’d been forced to cancel when their tour bus skidded off the road and took at least one glorious possible future with it. ‘I did another tour before we went back there,’ says Schneider. ‘Me and Flemming Larsen, actually, went out on tour with Slayer and neither one of us could sleep on the bus. I mean, I had to pass out to go to sleep. For years and years and years I had to sleep on a certain bunk or on the front couch.’ To help Metallica over any residual feelings of insecurity, in fact, Q Prime hired an American bus driver to travel with them. ‘He came with us and watched the other driver drive; that’s what his job was…to keep an eye on things.’

When, in April 1987, they released their first long-form video, a tribute to their man down, titled Cliff ’Em All, it seemed from the outside like an act of closure. Basking in a renewed round of rave reviews, within weeks of its release, Cliff ’Em All was certified both gold and platinum in the US music video charts. All surely was now well again in Metallica’s world. In fact, the deep and unsightly wounds inflicted by Burton’s death would remain open, continuing to fester for at least another twenty years, by which time a despairing Newsted would finally have had enough and thrown in the towel, leaving the band to try and do what they should have done in 1986. Not tour, not record, not paper over the ever-widening cracks, hoping it would be all right when they came to again in the morning. That day was coming whether they liked it or not. Meanwhile, things would just get worse – the pain, the bitterness, the recriminations and resentments, the awful guilt – stalking their rapidly growing success like an ever-lengthening shadow, night waiting to fall.

Compiled from bootleg footage recorded by fans, personal film clips belonging to the band and photos sourced from various locations, both official and unofficial, Cliff ’Em All was a groundbreaking release. More than a decade before such concepts as ‘reality TV’, the unscripted, unplanned, apparently random nature of the material came as a delightful surprise, whether one was a dyed-in-the-wool Metallica fan or merely a random viewer. By turns amusing, sad and surprisingly insightful, it’s the kind of thing we take for granted in these YouTube-inflected times but which seemed utterly revelatory back then: Cliff chilling out smoking ‘the greatest pot to hit these shores’; the band walking en masse into a liquor store and stealing enough beer and bites to see them through the evening; all this amidst a flood of Beavis and Butthead-style sniggering. Most of all, some glorious footage of the band in its earliest days, from Cliff’s second gig at the Stone in April 1983, via the Day on the Green in ’85 and several fan-shot bootleg clips from the summer ’86 Ozzy tour, where it became clear just how powerful a presence Burton was onstage and off – and how young and unconfident James in particular often was, not least when Dave Mustaine was still ruling the roost from the opposite side of the stage. Imagine that: caught in the spotlight between Cliff Burton on one side and Dave Mustaine on the other, behind you that little lunatic Lars. No wonder James felt he had a fight on his hands just keeping up.

After the tour the plan had been to begin writing for the next album, a process broken up with a smattering of lucrative festival dates scheduled for the summer. However, things changed when Hetfield broke his arm again in yet another skateboarding accident, this time in an empty swimming pool in Oakland Hills with Kirk and their pals Fred Cotton and Pushead. James had been wearing all the protective gear this time, he had been ‘just a little too vertical,’ recalled Cotton. ‘As soon as he came down into the bottom of the pool you could hear the snap.’ Forced to cancel what should have been a career-boosting appearance on NBC-TV’s highly influential Saturday Night Live,