Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [177]
Thorne was spot-on. Released in the UK ahead of the album, backed with a suitably phantasmagorical video (actually, a fairly ordinary, literal depiction of a ‘sandman’ haunting a sleeping child intercut with a band performance that made ‘One’ look like Gone With the Wind) and available in as many formats as Phonogram could devise – including regular seven-inch vinyl in black sleeve, with and without logo sticker; twelve-inch vinyl; three different CD versions; cassette-tape version; even box-sets, including limited-edition twelve-inch folder, plus the twelve-inch vinyl record and four ‘exclusive’ autographed Metallica photos, one of each member – ‘Enter Sandman’ reached Number Five, becoming along the way one of the best-selling singles of the year. The US release of ‘Enter Sandman’ was staged differently, timed to come after the album’s initial sales burst, helping push it back up the charts as the single broke into the Top Twenty, reaching Number Sixteen, the video becoming a regular feature of daytime MTV for months to come.
Aware more than most of the power of word of mouth, the band also made sure their fans got a chance to judge the new album’s merits ahead of release, holding special ‘listening parties’ in London, at the Hammersmith Odeon, and, most spectacularly, in New York at the 20,000-seater Madison Square Garden. Admission was free to Metallica fan club members and with the band also in attendance to introduce the album personally and sign autographs, both venues were packed. At the New York playback, James actually snuck into the audience during ‘Nothing Else Matters’ and was relieved to find ‘They were really attentive…really listening to what it said.’ In America it was also arranged for certain stores to open their doors at one minute past midnight on 12 August – the official release date of the album. Queues formed outside, in some cases, for up to eighteen hours before. A week later, Metallica – or the Black Album as it was already becoming known – debuted at Number One in both Britain and America. It also topped the charts in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Germany, Switzerland and Norway.
The band was already out on tour in Europe when they got the news, at a hotel in Budapest, where they were appearing as ‘special guests’ – second on the bill – to AC/DC at that year’s travelling Monsters of Rock festival. Lars said he read the fax from Q Prime and for a moment wasn’t sure how to react. ‘You think one day some fucker’s gonna tell you, “You have a number one record in America” and the whole world will ejaculate. I stood there in my hotel room [and] it was, like, “Well, okay.” It was just another fucking fax from the office.’ At least, that’s what he later told Rolling Stone. In truth, this was the moment he’d fantasised over since his days of chasing around after Diamond Head records and reading about the NWOBHM in Sounds. Complete validation for the years when he was a tennis loser; an LA reject, with a funny accent who never quite belonged anywhere.
Reviews were also more positive, and widespread, with the album subjected to the glowing critical spotlight not just in the metal press but across the board, as Rolling Stone, NME, Time Out, the Village Voice, the LA Times, the New York Times and others around the world lined up to sing its praises. This was the double-whammy Q Prime had banked on: commercial success on a scale previously thought beyond the reach of a ‘genre’ act such as Metallica, while still miraculously building on their critical profile. Suddenly, no one was using the words ‘thrash metal’ anywhere in Metallica articles. The subsequent NME cover story may have owed something, as Dave Thorne suggests, to ‘the fact that Steve Sutherland was the editor and was married to the head of press at Phonogram, Kaz Mercer, who remains to