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jacket and all that, posing up a storm. Lars is that way. He will be infatuated with certain people in his life and need to get into them. That’s just part of him, I guess. He likes learning things from people who have that something. Axl had that.’ As if to underline that fact, when the tour was over, Lars would not see Axl again for nearly fifteen years. ‘Axl was two people,’ said Lars, looking back later. ‘You were truly left wondering what the fuck was going to happen next. When he was in a good mood, he was the sweetest guy, and when he forgot to take his medicine or decided to go off, he was kind of a freak. He was the last person I’ve ever seen, though, besides maybe Bill Clinton, that when he walked into a room every single person was drawn to him. That’s a rare thing.’

Meanwhile, over a year on from its release, the Black Album was still selling hundreds and thousands of copies each week all over the world. Boosted by no less than five back-to-back hit singles – ‘Enter Sandman’ had been swiftly followed in the charts by ‘The Unforgiven’ (released in eight different formats in the UK alone), ‘Nothing Else Matters’ (also eight UK formats), ‘Wherever I May Roam’ (six formats) and, finally, at the end of 1992, ‘Sad but True’ (a further eight formats) – by the tour’s end in the summer of 1993, the album had sold nearly seven million copies in the USA, and a further five million abroad. It had become one of those albums no self-respecting record collection did not include, eventually notching up more than fifteen million US sales, to date, and nearly twenty-five million worldwide, making it one of the biggest-selling popular music albums of all time, in any genre.

The final money-spinning leg of the world tour was dubbed the Nowhere Else to Roam tour, another large outdoor co-headlining stint, this time in Europe with Lenny Kravitz. Its crowning glory was Metallica’s own headlining festival show back in England, in June, at the 55,000-capacity Milton Keynes Bowl. ‘Obviously it’s a great ego kind of thing to do it,’ Lars had said over the phone prior to the band’s arrival. ‘But it’s got to be right. I think Iron Maiden, when they did their first Monsters of Rock stadium tour probably did it better than anyone else; you’ve got to wait till the time is right. Now, all of a sudden this seems like the right thing for us to do.’

It certainly looked that way as I walked around the backstage area that afternoon. Lars was as friendly as ever, arriving at the festival site hours before he actually needed to, bounding around saying hello to friends old and new. The only difference, one couldn’t help noticing, was the gaggle of MTV crew members who followed him everywhere, cameras and mikes lapping up every scrap of attention that came his way, including scenes of themselves filming…themselves. The concert itself was flawless, with James now very much the star of the show, the archetypal metal frontman, intense, uncompromising, tall, thin, completely in control of the stage, a million miles and several lifetimes removed from the acne-ridden bundle of insecurities who had spent years trying to wriggle out of the frontman role. His bond with the audience now seemed unbreakable, complete, as though when he looked out at the thousands he saw a mirror image of himself looking back, fists raised. You could tell the audience, his people, felt they knew this man more intimately than they did their best friends. The hard-drinking, headbanging, woman-devouring, gun-toting, icon of good-(and bad-) time rock, of heavy fuckin’ metal, as he called it, raging from the stage. And yet, for all that he projected and made them think this way, they didn’t know the half of it – that even now James Hetfield was still only pretending, only doing what he thought he was obliged to do.

There were already signs of the change that was coming, but Metallica’s fans had been too busy multiplying and worshipping to read into them. ‘Having money, being part of all this freaks me out,’ James had said in the band’s first Rolling Stone cover story. ‘I like being