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By Root 448 0

walked onstage at Donington, where they were third on the bill below ex-Black Sabbath singer Ronnie James Dio and headliners Bon Jovi. For thousands of Metallica fans, Donington was their first chance to see the new-look line-up. Conversely, for Metallica it was important to prove they had barely changed at all; that it was business as usual – not to diminish the loss of their talismanic bassist, but to demonstrate that this was not some insurmountable obstacle. That there was still great substance to what they did – and where they would be going next, no matter who now occupied the side of the stage to James’ right. The set began well enough with three crowd-pleasing relics from the Cliff-shrouded past: ‘Creeping Death’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Fade to Black’. It wasn’t long, though, before they were dipping into the new EP in a neat bit of cross-promotional euphoria and future foundation-laying, injecting the huge element of fun the EP had winningly engendered, even down to wringing out the woozy intro to ‘Run to the Hills’ at the climax of the ‘Last Caress’/‘Green Hell’ medley.

Then, just as they were building towards the climax of their set, the audience’s attention was snatched away by the arrival overhead of the helicopter ferrying Bon Jovi to the backstage area. It seemed to take forever to navigate its way over the crowd, buzzing loudly towards the backstage area, where the ground was firmly ‘cleared’ by their ground staff security so that Jon and his band could disembark without having to engage with anyone else working there that day. ‘Fucking asshole!’ James raged when he came off stage. ‘He deliberately tried to fuck up our set.’ It hadn’t been quite that bad – a distraction, certainly, but one everyone bar possibly Hetfield got over quickly – but James took it personally. Grabbing a marker pen he scrawled the words ‘Kill Bon Jovi’ on his guitar. Jon Bon Jovi later told me it had all been a misunderstanding; that he was appalled that anyone would think he would deliberately try to ruin another band’s show, not least one appearing lower on the same bill as he. Jon made it clear, however, that he still recalled Hetfield’s comments on the Donington stage two years before about ‘spandex, make-up and oh baby’ songs and that there was no love lost between the two camps.

Metallica, self-styled dwellers of a permanent midnight world where clean-cut early risers such as Bon Jovi were considered the enemy, had been put in their place it seemed. What neither James Hetfield or Jon Bon Jovi – nor even Lars Ulrich, for all his secret dreams – could have foreseen was how drastically their positions would change over the next five years, and that it would be Metallica, bad boys dressed in black, who would ascend towards the heart of the sun, while Bon Jovi, once so untainted, would plunge like Icarus into the raging sea below, a reversal in fortunes so improbable that not even Peter Mensch could have considered it.

Or could he?

Ten

Wild Chicks, Fast Cars and Lots of Drugs

‘Hey, man,’ said Kirk, ‘you can do something about that, you know?’ We were standing in the dressing room at the Newcastle City Hall. Onstage, Glen Danzig, once of The Misfits, now fronting his new self-named band, was doing the crowd a big favour by playing for them.

‘About what?’

‘Your hair. You’re receding. Do something about it now, though, and you can fix it.’

I stared at him. He had caught me off guard. My hair? We were talking about my hair? I tried to play it cool, like who cares?

‘Uh huh, and what’s that?’

‘Rogaine, man,’ he smiled. ‘You know it?’

I did actually. That is, I had heard of something similar: Regaine.

‘Same thing, man,’ he said. ‘Minoxidil, right?’

My hairdresser had mentioned it to me the last time I’d had my hair cut but I was so taken aback I’d pushed it to the back of mind. Now this. Was my hair really doing that badly people were now just coming up to me and mentioning it?

‘No, man,’ said Kirk, ‘I just see it because I see it in me, too.’

I looked at his hair. Long, black, curly, kind of a high forehead