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for US radio to play. Seeing immediately that I had intruded on a sensitive moment – certainly for Lars, for whom the concept of editing album-length tracks into radio-friendly singles had always been antithetical to the Metallica philosophy – I accepted Mensch’s suggestion to ‘get the hell out’ and closed the door behind me. In retrospect, though, it was exactly this sort of pragmatism that would soon separate Metallica from the likes of Iron Maiden and Motörhead; groups they had grown up worshipping at the altars of but were now poised to leave far behind – on every level. It was no longer enough for Lars Ulrich to be in ‘the fastest, heaviest’ band in America, he now had his sights set on a much larger glittering prize. Not just best, but biggest.

As Mensch later put it, Metallica were ‘like the Grateful Dead of heavy metal. They can sell so much on their own, as they are. To take it further, it means edit a song for a single, do a video – all the usual stuff. And they realise that’s the only way to expand the audience. It’s not like the Sixties, when something really outside could make a mainstream impact.’ Or as Lars commented: ‘My whole view is that if taking the last guitar solo out could get the song out to more people who would hear, then buy the album, hear a fuller version and get turned on to Metallica music, then fine. “One” is nearly eight minutes long and has twenty-three guitar solos, so we could trim it a bit.’

Released in February 1989, in the middle of their first arena headline tour of America, what would really turn ‘One’ into Metallica’s first really significant singles success, however, was not the radio-edit, although that played an important part; it was their agreeing finally to make a video to go with it. Another former hard-and-fast rule broken, it came with another plausible bit of Lars philosophy to explain it. ‘If it had been crap, we wouldn’t have put it out,’ he said simply. ‘That was the deal. But it worked so well, we thought, sure, why not?’ Filmed in what looks like an underground bomb shelter – actually a disused warehouse in Long Beach – in December 1988, for a first video ‘One’ was a stunningly accomplished piece of work. Built around actual footage from the movie version of Johnny Got His Gun, starring Jason Robards, intercut with stark, strobe-lit shots of the band performing the song, the ‘One’ video would do for Metallica what none of their records or live performances, with or without Cliff, had yet been able to: both enhance their reputation as musical innovators and reposition the band centrally as mainstream rock stars.

It almost didn’t happen, though, after the band was turned down by a succession of top-drawer video directors, before coming to an arrangement with Michael Salomon, best known previously for his work with Dolly Parton and Glen Campbell. The major issue for Salomon was finding the right balance between band performance and film footage. ‘It’s a complicated story and to do it with just one or two sound-bites here and there really wouldn’t have made it,’ he later reflected. In the end, Salomon decided to go with his gut instincts and simply make the best video he could, putting the band’s vanity second, covering almost every solo with film footage, including snatches of dialogue occasionally obscuring the music. ‘The musician side of them said, “That’s not cool, we don’t get to hear the music.” I think they realised, though, that the story element was more important.’ This was an important lesson they would learn well. All their best future videos would relate back to the risks they took with ‘One’, all becoming mini-features in their own right, intercut with all sorts of images, of war, of prisoners, of nightmares, road trips, dreamscapes, white horses…eventually even girls.

Bill Pope shot the black-and-white performance footage at the same Long Beach warehouse where he had previously shot videos for Peter Gabriel and U2. Here, the band did put its foot down, insisting that the video showed them playing exactly the right notes, singing the right words, everything