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of Metallica began out on the road. The Madly in Anger with the World tour began officially on 30 April 2003, when they gave their first public performance with Rob Trujillo in the band during a video shoot for the ‘St. Anger’ single at San Quentin prison. A remarkable piece of work – not least the moving little speech James gives the menacing-looking inmates before filming starts, unseen in the final video cut but shown in Some Kind of Monster – it was still hard not to view it as terribly contrived; all part of the PR campaign to prove they had gotten over their icky make-up and men-kissing phase and gone back to their hard-as-fuck roots. Except, of course, the men in Metallica were never really hard in the first place: Ulrich was a middle-class kid who had identified the main chance and gone for it, wholly and unashamedly; Hetfield the living embodiment of the Wizard of Oz, a small, rapidly beating heart hiding behind a big scary screen, frantically tugging at levers and praying no one would ever glimpse the real him; Hammett the eternal softie who’d managed to keep his head down without entirely losing it, even if it had meant keeping himself nicely toasted for most of it. The only one who exuded any real-life menace was Trujillo, and even he had hardly been born on the mean streets; he just looked like he had. As Alexander Milas puts it, ‘I’m sorry but, you know, there’s just like no credibility in your band doing anything like that [prison video]. How can you believe in a metal band that moisturises? It just can’t happen.’

Nevertheless, it takes balls to come out, as James did, and tell the assembled mass of bald and tattooed musclemen, ‘Anger is an emotion I’ve struggled with pretty much all my life.’ They were at least trying to re-establish their musical identity, and taken at face value the ‘St. Anger’ video is the most hard-hitting thing Metallica had done since ‘One’ nearly fifteen years before. A week later they were the latest subject of MTV’s Icons tribute show, where contemporary metal acts that had once stood across the great Napster divide, such as Korn and Limp Bizkit, showed up to pay their respects. It was another significant plank laid in the public re-entry programme they were now embarked on. Metallica also played live, their first live public performance with Rob, and their first since James’ return from rehab. ‘We’re looking forward to spreading this new lust for life we have,’ he told Rolling Stone, doing his best to sound confident. ‘There’s a new strength in Metallica that’s never been there before. There are still fearful parts, too. But I’m pretty well set up. And I’m really proud of the new music. I think we did something where the pedal does not let up.’

They knew the real test, however, would come once they returned to the road proper. James, in particular, was anxious, terrified that he might relapse, undoing two years’ worth of work he’d already undergone. Just as with the studio, there would have to be new work rules agreed; the most important concerning the behaviour of those around the singer, rather than Hetfield himself. Namely, the others could drink, could do what they liked, but they would need to be polite about it and preferably out of James’ backstage orbit. ‘Me, Kirk and Trujillo can still throw down, believe me,’ Lars was quick to reassure. ‘There’s no issues. James has been an angel with that. He doesn’t preach, or police, or get up in everybody else’s shit.’ Being sober on the road ‘felt great but scary at the same time’, said James. He wondered ‘how many hours have been wasted sitting in a bar somewhere talking to people you’ll never see again?’ Instead, he tried seeing it all as ‘you would have done if it was your first tour’, going sightseeing and finding out about the various places around the world he now found himself in, rather than just treating it all as one amorphous drunken blur as he might have done in the past.

To ease themselves in, Metallica undertook a four-night run of shows to fan club members at San Francisco’s Fillmore Theater (formerly the Fillmore