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It wasn’t just being in Metallica and what it had done to him; it seemed to be something that had been there long before that. An itch you couldn’t quite scratch. That was the feeling I got anyway whenever I saw him – either up-close, frowning about something, or entirely impersonal, far away on some stage that always looked just that little bit too big for him.

That first time at the 100 Club you couldn’t really tell anything, except that it wasn’t Cliff up there any more. Occasionally there would be a break in the human tide and you got a glimpse, a quick Polaroid flared around the edges…James, hunched over the mike, his right arm blurring away at the battered face of his Flying V…Lars at the back, furiously pumping arms and legs, a drowning man trying somehow to climb from the sea…Kirk in brief silhouette, his shadow, as always, appearing to flit in and out of sync with the rest…And the other one, the new kid, the only time you really noticed him was when he collapsed from the heat and the roadies rushed to try and revive him. Later – many months later – when we finally met, at the restaurant at the hotel in Miami, he’d snarled when he heard my name and denied anything of the kind had ever happened, and, who knows, maybe I did get it wrong, me and all the other people yelling and pointing. I had never experienced the 100 Club like that before. Not even during the punk years, at the club’s worst, had I witnessed scenes like that. The way the rest of the band shushed him down, though – laughed over the top of his protestations, like saying they didn’t care whether it had happened or not, just don’t blow our good scene – made me feel for him. Just another one of those accidental things that only mattered to him, the new kid, they seemed to be saying, the sense that things like that were happening to him all the time, that my inaccurate review had been just one more pin in his voodoo doll.

Then, years later, watching him in the movie, seeing the hurt in his face still so raw like he was on the verge of tears – angry, self-righteous tears – talking defensively about how his music was ‘my children’, in that way people who don’t have kids tend to do, I felt sorry for him all over again, in the way one does when one sees an animal in pain, the lack of a common language making the offer of comfort impossible, wanting to offer your hand but afraid it might get bitten.

Fourteen years, six albums and just three miserable co-write credits later, the impossible shadow of Cliff Burton looming ever larger with every year that passes, if joining Metallica was still the best thing that ever happened to Jason Newsted, then leaving them finally in order to regain control, some vestige of self-respect, was at least the second-best thing that ever happened to him. Truthfully, I only met him a few times, spoke to him even less often, and barely knew him at all, just read the signals he was constantly sending out, loud and clear, the same as everybody else. And now he was gone I wouldn’t miss him at all. Nobody would. Not like they still did Cliff. And that was the real nub of the problem right there. Nothing Jason Newsted did or does or will one day do can ever compare to all the things Cliff Burton didn’t live long enough to do or not do…

For Metallica, the years between Reload in 1997 and their next full-bore album, St. Anger, in 2003, were a wasteland. There were records and tours aplenty, endless news items and high-profile events, but essentially, when you got right down to it, there wasn’t anything great or new to say, few positive vibrations, very little upward trajectory. Just a long time staring down the barrel of a gun, as if daring the worst to happen; for someone to come along, as indeed they duly did, and point out that the emperor’s new clothes were, in fact, made of nothing more substantial than hot air. Having won over the music business by proving they weren’t such freaks after all, that they could happily coexist within the mainstream, retain credibility and still make hundreds of millions