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lightweight but loaded with historical import, it was a credible stopgap to keep the band working out on the road while fulfilling its obligations to Elektra, Phonogram and Sony. Something for everybody, in fact – except perhaps the serious Metallica fans still waiting for the real follow-up to Load. As the NME noted in its review, Metallica may have grown up ‘on a diet of spandex, studs and the long-lamented New Wave of British Heavy Metal…speeding all that up and thrashing it around to the nth intense degree’, but on Garage Inc. ‘they come unstuck when they try to be trad, as with their sludge-boogie-plus-indulgence reading of Black Sabbath’s “Sabbra Cadabra”, or pub rock chug through “Whiskey in the Jar”. Meanwhile Blue Öyster Cult and Bob Seger covers, not to mention a sing-along Lynyrd Skynyrd power ballad, suggest middle-age spread affects the most terminally adolescent minds in the end.’

The result was yet another Number One hit in the USA, but a decidedly less successful release everywhere else, not least in the UK, where it scraped to Number Twenty-Nine – Metallica’s lowest chart position for a new album since Master of Puppets nearly thirteen years before. There were also three singles issued from Garage Inc. – ‘Turn the Page’, ‘Whiskey in the Jar’ and ‘Die, Die My Darling’. None of them even made the US Top 100, while only ‘Whiskey’ made the lower reaches of the UK Top Thirty. Even so, their version of a song that had been a Top Ten hit in Britain, in 1973, was derided for Hetfield’s misinterpretation of ‘Wake for my daddio’ as ‘Whack for my daddio’, due to Lizzy singer Phil Lynott’s Irish accent, thus rendering a key line of the chorus insensible. He was forgiven, though, if for no reason other than nobody really takes these cobbled-together packages terribly seriously. So it was – and remains – with Garage Inc.

It was, however, a tour de force compared to what came next: another double CD, released just twelve months later, this time of a live orchestral performance, punningly titled S&M [Symphony and Metallica]. An ambitious collaborative project with celebrated classical composer Michael Kamen and the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra, recorded over two nights at the Berkeley Community Theater in April 1999, it presented a selection of Metallica songs rearranged for group and orchestra. This had been done before, of course, notably by Lars’ beloved Deep Purple, whose 1969 performance with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra at London’s Albert Hall resulted in the Concerto for Group and Orchestra album. Since then, the idea that rock – that most grandiose and self-regarding of all pop idioms – might be wrought even larger by the addition of an eighty-piece symphony orchestra and conductor had been explored in several ways by various different artists; from the neo-classical stylings of progressive rock colossi such as Rick Wakeman, whose 1974 album Journey to the Centre of the Earth combined band, symphony orchestra and choir, to Emerson, Lake & Palmer, who performed regularly in America in the late 1970s with a full orchestra, and Roger Waters performing Pink Floyd’s The Wall in Berlin in 1990 with an East German symphony orchestra; via the less serious guitars-meets-cellos of the Electric Light Orchestra (ELO) and the post-punk modernism of Malcolm McLaren and his 1984, proto-techno version of ‘Madam Butterfly’. Even the Scorpions had recorded an album with the Berlin Philharmonic, Moment of Glory, which followed just months, in fact, after Metallica’s.

Hardly a new idea then, Kamen, a fifty-year-old American orchestral composer, conductor and arranger mainly of film scores, had also worked previously with Pink Floyd, Queen, Eric Clapton, David Bowie and several other high-profile rock artists. It was in the wake of his original introduction to Metallica in 1991 by Bob Rock, who’d invited him to write an orchestral arrangement for ‘Nothing Else Matters’, that Kamen first suggested ‘some sort of collaboration’ on a grander scale. Eight years later he got his wish. According to Kamen, the idea was ‘to create