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By Root 280 0

‘Enter Sandman’ and ‘Sad but True’. The latter – a monolithic musical statement whose juddering rhythm had come suddenly while recording ‘Stone Cold Crazy’ for Rubáiyát– was destined for greatness from the moment an awestruck Rock, listening for the first time to the demo, told Lars and James he thought it could be ‘a “Kashmir” for the Nineties’. The former, an even more crowning jewel and the must-have moment of all such classic albums, was another first for Metallica: an old-fashioned, born-lucky hit single. Based on the same little cartwheeling riff as other rock classics such as ‘Smoke on the Water’ and ‘All Right Now’, Kirk later recalled how he’d been listening to Louder Than Love, an early album by a then-unknown Seattle band called Soundgarden, ‘trying to capture their attitude toward big, heavy riffs. It was two o’clock in the morning. I put it on tape and didn’t think about it.’ When he later played it to the others, however, Lars told him, ‘That’s really great. But repeat the first part four times.’ It was that suggestion, said Kirk, ‘that made it even more hooky’.

In the end, it took more than ten months to complete the album, would cost them than over $1 million, and sent them all, at various times, so crazy that nearly fifteen years later Rock would still describe it as ‘the hardest album I ever made’. The band felt the same way. ‘It was difficult with Bob,’ said Lars. ‘It was the hardest record to make with Bob because we didn’t know each other and there was no trust yet. So we were very wary of each other.’ They had pushed themselves so hard, ‘we all started hating each other by the finish’. When I visited, halfway through, I noticed a boxer’s punch-bag and gloves hanging up in one of the rooms. ‘For fucking tension!’ Lars guffawed when I pointed at it. ‘You know that shit, you’re trying to get something down and you can’t get it down right and you just need to hurt something. Then you receive the bill for it next week. You can hurt that and not have to pay for it.’ James, he added, had been using it a lot of late: ‘But now that Jason has started doing his bass he uses it a lot, too.’ It was, Rock concluded, ‘a very tough album to record from the point of view of what they were trying to achieve and where they had come from and where I had come from. So it took a while to work out the way it was to be done.’ More than just trying to make something accessible, this album was simply ‘the first time you really felt that there was some real human emotion behind the music’.

Speaking with Lars at the studio while James sat on the other side of the glass, guitar cradled on his lap, working through the cyclical guitar part to ‘The Unforgiven’, it was clear they had been working towards a very specific agenda from day one. He talked of how, when the band had started out, his favourite drummers were technically gifted craftsmen such as Rush’s Neil Peart and Deep Purple’s Ian Paice: ‘So for the next eight years I’m doing Ian Paice and Neil Peart things, proving to the world that I can play.’ Now, after absorbing the lessons their new father-figure producer had instilled, Lars’ two favourite drummers were Charlie Watts of the Rolling Stones and Phil Rudd of AC/DC – unflashy, solid as rock, foundation-builders. ‘I used to think that stuff was easy but it’s not, it’s hard…fucking hard.’

Another concession to the forthright commerciality of the new album was in its title – simply Metallica, eponymous titles being every major record label’s preferred option: uncontroversial, uncomplicated and easy to remember. It was ironic then that the album would quickly become known not by that name but for the nickname given to it because of its forbidding, all-black sleeve – The Black Album. It was like the photo negative of The Beatles’ White Album (itself actually titled simply The Beatles, but renamed by fans after its similarly featureless, all-white cover).

‘It was one of our first days in the studio,’ Lars explained, and he was browsing through a typically colourful heavy metal mag, noticing how the ads for various albums