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of languid psychedelia of a gig poster from the 1960s – by New York artist Andres Serrano. Originally created, in 1990, by Serrano mingling his own semen with bovine blood and placing the messy results between sheets of Plexiglas, it was Kirk who first suggested the image as the album cover after coming across it in a photo-book of Serrano’s work, Body and Soul, which he’d bought during a visit to San Francisco’s Museum of Modern Art. ‘When I first saw the picture, I thought it looked like hot-rod flames, because I have a hot-rod-flame tattoo,’ he recalled, blandly. It didn’t hurt either that Serrano’s art was well known for courting controversy. His 1987 image Piss Christ, a cloudy amber rendition of a crucifix submerged in Serrano’s urine, had attracted predictable opprobrium from the Church, with the Revd Donald E. Wildmon launching a public campaign against it. Republican senators Jesse Helms and Alfonse D’Amato also denounced Serrano from the Senate floor, the latter tearing a photo of Piss Christ in two, while Helms publicly branded Serrano ‘a jerk’.

A Brooklyn-born New Yorker of Hispanic-African ancestry, the then forty-five-year-old Serrano was a former drug addict who had first made an impact on contemporary art circles in the mid-1980s, becoming a regular target – somewhat in the mould of the late Robert Mapplethorpe – for right-wing Reagonites in their attempts to stymie federal funding of the arts. Ironically, the Catholic Church was less concerned. In 1991, he was allowed access to nuns and friars in Europe for a series of typically outlandish portraits, also included in Body and Soul, along with ‘artful’ close-ups of corpses in morgues laid out on tables. When Kirk showed Lars Semen and Blood III he ‘jumped on it the second I saw it’. James and Jason, typically, were less impressed. So much so, Newsted walked out of the room every time the subject came up at band meetings and later refused to comment on it in public. ‘I think he cares too much about what the fans think,’ shrugged Hammett. ‘Whereas I care what the fans think, but I’m not going to let that dictate or censor what I do.’ Hetfield made his feelings crystal-clear. ‘I was worried about not being able to get the music into the K-Marts of the world,’ he admitted at the time, in a weird reverse-echo of why they had renamed their first album Kill ’Em All.

Speaking in 2009 to writer Ben Mitchell, James admitted he was uncomfortable with the whole motivation behind the music and image of the Load era: ‘Lars and Kirk drove on those records. The whole, “We need to reinvent ourselves” topic was up. Image is not an evil thing for me, but if the image is not you then it doesn’t make much sense. I think they were really after a U2 kind of vibe, Bono doing his alter ego. I couldn’t get into it…The whole cover thing, it went against what I was feeling.’ He was also resentful, he said, about ‘being left out of the bond that they had through their drug use – Lars and Kirk were very into abstract art, pretending they were gay, I think they knew it bugged me. It was a statement around all that. I love art, but not for the sake of shocking others. I just went along with the make-up and all of this crazy, stupid shit that they felt they needed to do.’ It was the first time, he confessed, when musically, rather than the bold new statement Lars and Kirk made it out to be, the band felt unsure of its footing: ‘A lot of the fans got turned off quite a bit by the music but mostly, I think, by the image.’

For Lars Ulrich, however, the logic was obvious. If Metallica could no longer be expected to fulfil the role of outsiders – that job having been taken by the grunge generation – then the least they should do is try to ensure they arose to that pantheon of bands that existed somewhere way beyond the conventions of rock fashion. ‘Now you got U2 and R.E.M. – and Metallica,’ he said in 1996. ‘In America, these borders just don’t exist any more. After Cobain came along, everything became so blurred. Nowadays, bands are just bands: some are harder, some are softer, but heavy