Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [146]
Master of Puppets had marked the end of Metallica’s licensing deal with Music for Nations. Unlike Jonny Z in his struggle to retain control against the encroaching interests of the much larger and more powerful Q Prime, Martin Hooker was not only keen to renew the band’s contract but he also had the financial means to do so. Peter Mensch, however, had bigger fish to fry. He wanted Metallica on a British and European label commensurate in size to Elektra in the USA and CBS in Japan. Specifically, he wanted them on Phonogram, where he already had Def Leppard. ‘We did offer them a considerably bigger deal than Phonogram,’ says Martin Hooker, ‘worth well over £1 million, which at that time was the biggest deal we’d ever offered anyone.’ He adds, ‘Unfortunately, Q Prime weren’t even prepared to discuss it as it suited their purposes to have the band at Phonogram.’ In fact, says Hooker, Q Prime, who were ‘amazed at our offer’, had already agreed the deal with Phonogram without even speaking to MFN. ‘When we found out, we then offered them a very generous new deal just to hold onto the catalogue that we already had. I explained that this would be very beneficial to the band as an extra income source that wouldn’t be recouped against tour support or recording costs et cetera on the new album [as it would at Phonogram]. I thought this made a lot of financial sense for the band. Needless to say I was incredulous to find out that Q Prime had already agreed to throw the existing catalogue into the Phonogram deal.’
Says Hooker: ‘My back catalogue was still selling truck-loads. So they [must have] really, really wanted those three records, to help them recoup their balance…they obviously pressured him and eventually, I think like a year later, when the second term expired, they took the back catalogue off me, which was totally within their rights to do so, of course.’ Hooker would have one last laugh, though. When Metallica left for Phonogram, MFN rereleased MOP as a ‘limited edition’ double album, claiming that the extra-wide grooves on the vinyl gave the music a more crystal-clear sound. ‘I wouldn’t say that it was any better,’ concedes Gem Howard now, ‘but it was louder. Because you can cut it much louder when you’re doing it at forty-five rpm on a twelve-inch, because there’s more room in the grooves, which makes it sound better…’ He goes on: ‘It seems laughable now but in those days we were getting kids writing to us saying how wonderful the sound quality was and we sold tens of thousands of it – incredible.’ Gem says the final figure for combined British and European sales of all three Metallica albums on MFN is now in excess of 1.5 million, or ‘about 500,000 each’. MOP remains the single biggest-selling album Music for Nations ever released.
Dave Thorne, then senior product manager in the International Department at Phonogram in London, wouldn’t normally have been involved in the Metallica campaign. Having recently worked with Bon Jovi, Rush, Cinderella, and several other rock-related Phonogram artists, however, he found himself in a central role in the Metallica deal, he says now, ‘because of my connections and understanding of heavy metal’. Thorne explains how the ‘key link’ in the deal had been Peter Mensch’s existing relationship with the label’s director of business affairs, John Watson: then Phonogram’s senior lawyer. The first time Thorne got wind of the deal was when he was called into the office of managing director David Simone, who was there with Watson. They told Dave they had the chance to sign Metallica and asked what he thought their long-term commercial prospects were.
‘I kind of got excited and said they are the band at the moment in the extreme metal scene’, characterising them as ‘the Rush of extreme metal’. When he added that Metallica