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went that summer they were the most talked about band on the Monsters bill. ‘We’ve been very lucky with critical acclaim from a lot of fashionable magazines,’ Lars acknowledged when we spoke. ‘All these writers who would spew about Bruce Springsteen or Prince, usually. Metallica’s kinda been lumped into that crowd in America.’ Why them, though? Why not, say, Slayer? He took a deep breath as he tried to keep the condescension out of his voice. ‘I think a lot of it has to do with our approach lyrically, and about wanting to confront issues that were more realistic and had more to do with things that were happening around us. I’m the first to line up for a Slayer record when it comes out, ’cos I think Slayer are the best at what they do. But lyrically, it’s a whole different kettle of fish. We’ve always been very adamant about shying away from the metal clichés – one of them being the whole sexist, satanist crap. And as a consequence it seems all the trendsetting journalists have been throwing acclaim at Metallica right, left and centre…’

As Lars had predicted, there was, however, a significant shaking of heads among certain older Metallica fans. Accusations of sell-out were rife, justifiably so, from a certain old-school perspective. Even two decades on, it’s a subject that polarises even their staunchest allies. The normally outspoken Robb Flynn, who had been such a big fan as a teenager, and whose band Machine Head was actually supporting Metallica on tour when we spoke in early 2009, managed to change the subject when I asked for his specific views on Black. As Joey Vera puts it, ‘The Black Album was never in the cards…But they were very smart in what they did. And Lars probably had a lot to do with that, working with the management company. They made some really, really, really smart decisions, albeit maybe some of them questionable to some of the fans. But in the end they made very smart decisions all along the way.’

Others agreed. Says David Ellefson, ‘The Black Album, sonically, is just one of the best-sounding records ever made in the history of multi-track recording.’ Even Flemming Rasmussen, frozen out after carrying the can for the production nightmare of Justice, ‘absolutely loved’ the Black Album, he says: ‘It sounded great, well produced, well played, I thought it was brilliant. They were doing a lot of the stuff I wanted them to do on Justice, in terms of sounds and all the things that simplified everything. They went from the really long songs to one song, one riff. And the fact that James suddenly had started taking an interest in singing pleased me very much. ’Cos this was like the first album where he actually sings, and where you can hear that he takes it seriously. I think it’s a fabulous album.’

The big question was: what would Cliff have made of it? The feeling was that Burton, so long the uncompromising soul of the band, would have been frankly appalled by this turn of events. As Joey Vera says now, ‘it’s unimaginable’ the band would have made such an album were Cliff still alive: ‘I’m not saying they would have turned into King Crimson or anything, but you never know. It could have been this crazy who-knows-what, you know?’

Prophetically, however, in what proved to be his final interview, less than forty-eight hours before his death, Cliff told Jorgen Holmstedt of Sweden’s OK! magazine that he thought Metallica would become more ‘mellow and melodic’ as time went by. ‘We don’t care about that right now,’ he insisted, but was remarkably prescient about what might eventually happen, speculating that they would work with ‘some big-name producer’, something he said they had actually considered for MOP. ‘If we get our wish,’ he said, ‘we’ll probably record in Southern California, probably in Los Angeles.’ He had not liked enduring ‘the worst winter’ of their months at Sweet Silence in Denmark, complaining that there had been ‘no energy’. Next time, he said, ‘it would be cool to do it somewhere where it’s light and [there’s] plenty of sun’. Cliff’s musical tastes were certainly broad enough to encompass