Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [188]
What about Nirvana? I persisted. What did he make of them? His voice became cold. ‘Erm…what do I think about Nirvana?’ he stalled, trying to think of the right thing to say, rather than show his real feelings. ‘I don’t mind Nirvana. They don’t really do very much for me, but I don’t mind them, you know, they have very nice, hummable pop metal anthems.’ I laughed at that one and he went on, encouraged. ‘Some of their attitude annoys me a little bit, though. Because they’re so…I dunno, they just seem really contrived to me, somehow.’ It offended him in some way? ‘No, just that whole attitude they have. “Oh, we don’t wanna be a big band. We don’t wanna sell a million records.” If you don’t want to sell any records, don’t release any records, you know what I mean? They should just be glad there’s a million motherfuckers that wanna listen to their stuff.’ I had never heard him sound so old, so off the pace. He sounded like Dee Snider seeing Metallica onstage for the first time all those years before, then turning to Jonny Z and asking: ‘What is that, Jonny?’
Eventually, though, Lars would come to terms with the whole thing, once it had been tamed in his mind. Meanwhile, others had also tried to keep up. Judas Priest singer Rob Halford, whose homosexuality had been no secret in the business but largely been kept from the fans for the past twenty years, chose this moment not only to leave Priest for a solo career, but also to publicly come out, live on MTV, where he appeared in his new Nineties guise of make-up, black fingernail polish and a flurry of black feather-boas. None of this inflamed the interest of the grunge generation, who merely tittered. Iron Maiden singer Bruce Dickinson also read the runes and left the band for a solo career, recording two self-consciously ‘different’ albums, neither of which was a hit, and soon found himself back playing clubs – neither fish nor fowl in the new post-grunge era. Others, such as Mötley Crüe and Poison, merely grunged-up their acts, shedding important members and losing countless fans. Others still, like Maiden and Priest, simply carried on as they always had, King Canute stoically commanding the tide to turn even as their careers were being washed away, bringing in new, copycat singers and merely delaying the inevitable. (All would later revert to previous, more conspicuously successful forms in order to forge new careers in the coming classic rock era, but that was still some years away and could not have been anticipated back in the grunge-is-all killing fields of the mid-1990s.)
The only survivors were those few Eighties stars who had always exhibited as much brains as brawn, and even they had to work out their strategies carefully in order to successfully pull it off. Smart cookies such as Bon Jovi and Def Leppard, both of whom conspicuously amended their public image, cutting their hair, ditching the metaphorical shoulder pads, even sprouting semi-convincing facial hair, temporarily ditching the big rock anthems for less showy but more easy-on-the-ear power ballads, hoping no one would notice the incredible lengths they were prepared to go to in order to keep their careers alive. Things were moving fast again now, though, and even they were sent scurrying back to the drawing board as grunge was suddenly holed beneath the waterline by the grim suicide, in April 1994, of Kurt Cobain, putting a shotgun in his mouth after pulling a syringe from his arm. Within months the emphasis had switched in the UK to something called Britpop – indie bands with suddenly loud guitars and nicely contrived bad attitudes that made the grunge stars seem over-earnest, musically flatulent and – biggest crime of all – badly dressed. Bands such as Blur, Oasis, Pulp and the usual gaggle of slipstream followers were the new music-mag messiahs whose artful mien reached back to a time before hard rock and heavy metal, to the pre-dawn days of The Beatles, The Kinks,