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By Root 498 0

Metallica album. I really felt we gelled as a band and we gelled as people, and that’s what Master of Puppets became. And that only ended because we lost a dear friend and we had to pick up the pieces and start again.’ Looking back now, he said, he felt that Master and Black were still the band’s best albums: ‘We had this vision. For Master we just wanted to make the heaviest, most consistent album we could; with the Black Album it was more about spreading the Metallica gospel – and still being heavy at the same time.’ It was the making of MOP that still stood out most in his memory, though, because ‘it was just an amazing time for us. We were putting all the right notes in all the right places. But we didn’t set out to make something that would stand the test of time twenty years from now. That wasn’t on our radar at all. We just wanted to make the best possible album we could make at the time. We really just set our sights to that and buckled down. And we always felt that if we did indeed give it all we had and it didn’t pan out the way we wanted to, at least we could say we tried our best. That was our attitude. Frankly, I’m amazed it still sounds so fresh. I put it on the other day, just to give it a listen ahead of talking to you, and my thought was: if you released MOP today it would be right up there with all the newest releases – you know, sound-wise, quality-wise, recording-wise, concept-wise – it’s still relevant today. Even the lyrical content, the things James was writing about back then, it’s still relevant today. The music, the sounds, the attitude, the approach, it’s all still relevant today ’cos people are still using those techniques today that we kind of forged. We were aware of how much people expected from us. We were a different band, we were an extreme band and we were aware of the fact that we had a very unique sound, and we were just very bent on expanding upon that sound. And it all just went right for us…’

Entitled the Escape from the Studio 06 tour (where they had been working on ideas for their next album), they first performed the album all the way through at the giant Rock am Ring festival in Germany on 3 June. Including the first-ever complete performances of ‘Orion’ (in the past, only highlights of the middle section had been performed as part of either Jason’s bass solo or impromptu instrumental passages within other numbers). As well as MOP in its entirety, it was notable that only one number – ‘Fuel’ – from the Load/Reload era was included and none at all from St. Anger. The usual three numbers from Black – ‘Enter Sandman’, ‘Nothing Else Matters’ and ‘Sad but True’ – formed the backbone of the encores and the usual three from Ride the Lightning (‘Creeping Death’, ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’ and ‘Fade to Black’) were all played at the start of the show. Plus, just ‘One’ from Justice, and only ‘Seek and Destroy’ from Kill ’Em All, Kirk playing his Boris Karloff guitar; James with extra-long goatee; Lars, hair thinning but stamina still high; Rob gurning through ‘Orion’ while channelling the spirit of Cliff. It was an amazing spectacle that would be repeated later that same month at the Donington festival in England – now rebranded as the Download festival – and again over the remaining dates in Ireland, Estonia, Italy and, in August (after another break), for two shows in Japan and a final climactic performance at the Olympic Main Stadium in Seoul, South Korea on 15 August.

Meanwhile, behind closed doors, plans were already being laid for an even more surprising, if typically shrewd, return to their roots with their next album. Halfway through recording St. Anger, Phil Towle had told them: ‘All this work you’re doing right now is not for this record, it’s for the next one.’ And so it proved. Reading the runes as wisely as ever, the band had gone out on a limb and decided not to include Bob Rock in the new project. Coincidentally – or perhaps not – there had been an online petition that included the virtual signatures of more than 20,000 fans calling for Metallica to jettison Rock as producer.