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substantial advances’, explained Metallica attorney Jody Graham, ‘which are then recoupable by artists’ royalties. Then they get the rewards for risking that money.’ Unusually, however, Metallica had never been in an unrecouped situation, so there was no basis for Elektra constructing a deal based on ‘risk’. The success of the band had effectively eliminated any element of risk for years to come. As Lars astutely pointed out, ‘We’re a record company’s dream because we don’t require radio promotion or marketing. We don’t go out and make million-dollar videos. We tour until we fall on our faces and that buzz generates word of mouth. We’re as low maintenance a group as you can get.’ He may have been overstating the case somewhat – the expensive videos and promotion were very much becoming the norm even for Metallica – but the principle still held. Moreover, according to Metallica’s legal argument, in recent years it had accounted for up to twenty per cent of Elektra’s domestic billings, generating more than $200 million in revenues in the USA alone. The fly in the ointment, and the straw that Elektra clung to, was that the band had officially still only recorded four of the seven albums it had originally contracted for. The counter-argument: that aside from the albums, Metallica had also released the Garage Days EP – regarded as a Top Thirty mini-album in the USA – and a special deluxe edition box-set in 1993 titled Live Shit: Binge & Purge, containing three live CDs and two live concert videos, which retailed in the USA for $100 (where it sold over 300,000 copies) and in the UK for £75. There had also been the release of two platinum long-form videos with Cliff ’Em All and A Year and a Half in the Life of Metallica (detailing the recording of the Black Album), ‘despite having no contractual obligation to do so’.

By December, Lars was in New York, where depositions for the looming court case were now in process, sitting in the same room as Robert Morgado, ‘him nervously smiling over at me. It was quite funny being in a room with twelve lawyers. And me sitting there after sleeping three hours, still drunk from the night before, with my shades on, not having showered in a week.’ Eventually, a new agreement was reached when Burnstein and Mensch accompanied Lars to a meeting with Doug Morris and his advisers. ‘We said, “All the people who can fix this are in this room. We don’t need to deal with lawyers, with the food chain. Let’s talk this through.”’ Two hours later they ‘came to an agreement that everybody felt comfortable with’. Lars stuck his hand out, Morris shook it, ‘and there was the deal’. Metallica hadn’t walked away with an unequivocal victory. They would still need to deliver three more albums, but under much improved financial terms and conditions, in regard to how they chose to deliver material for those albums, the impact of which would be felt over the next five years.

The other members of Metallica, meanwhile, were undergoing their own re-education – literally, in the case of Kirk, who actually enrolled for a semester at the City College of San Francisco, where he took classes in film, jazz and Asian studies (the latter reflecting his mother’s Filipino heritage) and came away with straight ‘A’s. Now divorced from Rebecca, who got a sports car and a significant financial settlement, and living back in the heart of the city – modelling his home as a Gothic retreat full of long, candlelit corridors, the walls covered in rare Hollywood posters for the original Frankenstein and Dracula movies, its vast ceilings hand-decorated in paintings of moon-bathed night scenes full of forked lightning and thunderclouds – Kirk was suddenly part of a younger, more boho crowd. This was something that became a huge influence on his metamorphosis into the make-up-wearing, pierced and tattooed character we would meet for the first time on Load. Musically, he had also moved on, although, unlike Lars, not into the emotional quicksand of grunge or self-referential peacocking of Britpop, but towards more left-field musical innovators