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a new, harder edge, and he wanted to record quickly, unlike MOP, which even he agreed had taken too long. Besotted with the Guns N’ Roses album, Appetite for Destruction, which contained so many swear words radio wouldn’t play it, most of all he wanted to ensure Metallica didn’t get left behind by what he called ‘the new dicks on the block’. He later recalled listening to the first single from the Appetite album, ‘It’s So Easy’, on a flight home to San Francisco and being unable to believe the unashamed misogyny of the line, ‘Turn around bitch, I got a use for you’, nor the pay-off at the end of the final verse when singer W. Axl Rose yells ‘Why don’t you just…fuck off!’ ‘It just blew my fuckin’ head off,’ Lars excitedly told James. ‘It was the way Axl said it. It was so venomous. It was so fucking real and so fucking angry.’ It was the start of an obsession with Axl and Guns N’ Roses that would eventually see both bands touring together, although it would not be one shared with James.

When it became apparent that Flemming Rasmussen, their nominal choice to record with again, would not be available as quickly as they would have liked, Lars, secretly delighted, seized on the situation to put forward a more exciting alternative: Mike Clink, the Baltimore-born producer who’d overseen the recording of Appetite for Destruction. Clink had begun his career as an engineer at New York’s Record Plant studios, assisting producer Ron Nevison on hit albums by soft rock giants such as Jefferson Starship, Heart and, most notably, Survivor’s huge 1982 hit single and album, Eye of the Tiger. Clink’s main attributes, according to GN’R guitarist Slash, were ‘incredible guitar sounds and a tremendous amount of patience’. Smart enough to realise the records he’d made before were essentially ‘pop albums’, he’d listened carefully when Slash had played him Aerosmith albums in preparation for the Appetite sessions. Interestingly, the album Axl had asked him to take special note of had been Metallica’s Ride the Lightning.

With One on One studios in North Hollywood booked for the first three months of 1988, Lars asked Mensch to put a deal together that would bring in Clink as producer of the new album. Clink, a shrewd operator looking for a project that would extend his newfound reputation as the go-to guy for cutting-edge rock bands, was intrigued enough by the approach to accept at first time of asking. Nevertheless, on the surface it seemed an odd fit: Clink was known for capturing a looser, bluesy, as-live feel in the studio, while Metallica were known more for their almost icily precise sheet-metal riffs and machine-like rhythms. Somehow it would be Clink’s job to marry the two. As he says now, ‘They hired me because they enjoyed [and] really liked the Guns N’ Roses records.’ However, the message he got in his initial conversation with Q Prime, ‘was that they do things the Metallica way. And I didn’t really know what that was until I got into the middle of it.’

James was even less sure. No fan, he, of the GN’R record, as far as James could see, Clink wasn’t anything special, just another of Lars’ passing fancies. He watched patiently while they searched for a drum sound that seemed to match whatever requirements were going through both Lars’ and Mike’s heads, then lost patience when it came to his guitar sound. Although they managed to do what they always did at the start of an album and lay down a couple of rough-hewn covers in order to iron out any potential problems – in this case, Budgie’s ‘Breadfan’ and Diamond Head’s ‘The Prince’, tracks so rough they made the material on the Garage Days EP sound polished – instead of smoothing out their differences, it only highlighted how far apart their thinking still was, especially between Hetfield and Clink. ‘I just flipped out,’ said James, ‘couldn’t hang with it any more.’

Says Clink now, ‘As much as I believe they wanted me to put my magic on the tracks, I think that they were used to doing things on their own and doing it their own way.’ He adds, pointedly, ‘I always felt that I was in the