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By Root 437 0

all looked the same. ‘All these cartoon characters and all this steel and blood and guts. It was like, “Let’s get as far away as possible from this.”’ As far away as they could get, they decided, was to have a completely bare, monochromatic sleeve, with no information whatsoever on the front, save the barely discernible image of a serpent coiled in one corner. (A symbol, perhaps, of the forbidden fruit they had now bitten into?) The colour they chose was inevitable. ‘The fact is that we all like black as a colour.’ Lars shrugged. ‘Sure, there have been some people who’ve thought it was rather Spinal Tap, but if it came down to a choice between black and pink, you know what I mean? People can throw all this Tap shit at me all day, it just reflects off me. I don’t give a shit.’ Or, as James put it: ‘Here it is, black sleeve, black logo, fuck you.’

Another, albeit more oblique, reference to the altered perspective of the new album, along with its more pronounced choruses and shorter tracks, were the bare minimum credits on the sleeve. Where in the past Metallica album sleeves had been crammed with credits and thank-yous – even occasional fuck-yous – the Black sleeve contained the lyrics to the songs, the names of the four band members and their instruments, and the barest production details.

Lars was sure, he said, that ‘we’re gonna get a lot of people saying we’re selling out, but I’ve heard that shit from Ride the Lightning on. People were already going, “Boo! Sell-out!” even back then.’ Just because the tracks were shorter ‘doesn’t mean they’re any more accessible’. It was already clear, however, that increased accessibility was the whole point. The subject matter may have been as dark as ever – ‘Sad but True’, he said, was ‘about how different personalities in your mind make you do different things and how some of those things clash and how they fight to have control over you’, while ‘The Unforgiven’ was about ‘how a lot of people go through their life without taking any initiative. A lot of people just follow in the footsteps of others. Their whole life is planned out for them, and there’s certain people doing the planning and certain people doing the following’ – but the music was now of many colours, all of them supremely eye-catching.

The best example of this was the track already designated the album’s lead-off single: the enticingly named ‘Enter Sandman’. ‘That song has been on the fucking song titles list for the last six years,’ Lars said in an attempt to waylay any suggestion it had been written specifically as a single for this album. ‘I’d always looked at “Enter Sandman” and thought, what the fuck does that mean? Me being brought up in Denmark and not knowing about a lot of this shit, I didn’t get it. Then James clued me in. Apparently the Sandman is like this children’s villain – who comes and rubs sand in your eyes if you don’t go to sleep at night. So it’s a fable [which] James has just given a nice twist to.’ He added: ‘Six years ago I looked at “Enter Sandman” and thought, “Naw, let’s write ‘Metal Militia’…Metal all the way, you know?”’ Not any more.

The most important thing now would be what their various record companies thought of the finished product. Elektra was ecstatic. This would be the kind of Metallica album the company could really get its teeth into – one with multiple hit singles, great production, broad-scale ideas; in short, something with what the business called ‘legs’. Working off that giant buzz, Mensch scheduled meetings with various heads of department at Phonogram across Europe, beginning with Dave Thorne and the team in London.

‘I don’t think anybody can honestly say that when they listened to that album they thought, “This is going to be the biggest-selling metal album in the history of music,”’ says Thorne now. But when Mensch first played them the album ‘we were just gobsmacked because it was an absolute quantum leap on from anything that we’d ever heard anybody do, frankly, on the metal scene. And I remember him saying, in typical Mensch style, “Elektra got this fucking crazy