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Certainly there was nothing new to their approach in that respect, the two working from home alone on a four-track, with Kirk invited down at a later stage to consider his guitar parts, and Jason not invited at all on the pretext that, with only four tracks to work with, there was no room for bass at that stage anyway. As a result, of the nine tracks eventually slated for the album – all essentially Hetfield/Ulrich compositions – just three would also bear Kirk’s surname, just one Jason’s, plus one Cliff’s, a posthumous work melded from ‘some bits and pieces’ the bass player had left on tape, over which James intoned a four-line poem the bassist had also left behind entitled ‘To Live is to Die’. In fact, the only big difference initially was the decision to record the album closer to home this time, in Los Angeles, a choice rooted, paradoxically, in a newfound conservatism – at least, away from the stage – and their sudden desire to be close to their various partners.

This was one aspect of their lives the young Metallica went out of their way to keep off-limits from the press, even the almost venally loquacious Lars, who became uncharacteristically tongue-tied the first time he introduced me to his English-born wife, Debbie. A fun, fair-haired, plain-talking girl from the Midlands, the two had met during the band’s stay in London in 1984 and married early in 1987, during the brief hiatus when James was still nursing his broken wrist. It wasn’t that Lars hid his wife from the press, it just happened to be one of the very few things he didn’t talk at length about. Plus, ladies’ man Lars didn’t like to think of anyone cramping his style and while he clearly loved being around Debbie, the marriage was doomed to end just three years later. These, after all, were Lars’ wild years and, with the band finally taking off, no time to be married to its principal party animal. As he later said, for a while they had considered naming their next album, Wild Chicks, Fast Cars and Lots of Drugs, such was the state of play in Metalliworld at the time. How could any homespun, working-class English girl hope to compete with that?

Kirk, too, had chosen just this moment to marry his pretty American girlfriend, Rebecca (Becky), the two tying the knot in December, just a few weeks before the band began work on the new album. From the outside, Kirk and Becky looked like the perfect couple, almost a mirror image of each other, with their long curly hair, elfin faces and large brown eyes. Becky was ditzy, airy-fairy, and fitted in neatly with Kirk’s own public persona as the roach-sucking, comic-book-collecting, easygoing hippy minstrel. In fact, there was a new edge starting to emerge in the guitarist’s character as he began living out his own rock star fantasies, sometimes involving Becky, sometimes not, and cocaine began to take preference over marijuana as his drug of choice. Their marriage, too, would end after just a few short years.

Jason, who had split from his longstanding girlfriend Lauren Collins, a college student from Phoenix, shortly after joining Metallica, now became involved with a new girlfriend, Judy, who would become the first Mrs Newsted over the coming year, although they got divorced even quicker than Lars or Kirk, deciding they’d made a mistake almost immediately. The only one who didn’t get married at this point was James, and he, ironically, was the one perhaps most deeply in love. Indeed, his girlfriend Kristen Martinez would later inspire one of Metallica’s best-loved songs and one of the cornerstones of their far more widespread popularity in the 1990s, ‘Nothing Else Matters’. That was the only time James even semi-acknowledged his affair with Kristen publicly, even going as far as to later claim not to have written the song about her at all, so deep was his hurt when they too broke up in the wake of Metallica’s now rocketing success.

That, however, was in the future. There were no love songs planned for the fourth Metallica album. Instead, Lars was determined to place the emphasis on