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is no compelling reason for them to release a new album, although with the numbers for Death Magnetic so overwhelming – more than five million worldwide sales and still counting, as I write in the late summer of 2010 – they will presumably do so, maybe even another self-styled sequel of sorts. All we can be really sure of is that the platforms on which their music will be delivered will be various and absolutely up to the minute. As another champion of theirs, former Kerrang! and Metal Hammer editor – now Universal Records executive – Dante Bonutto says, ‘I think they’ll give people a choice of how they want to buy their music. And I think they’ll create formats that will reward fan loyalty. I think the vinyl thing will stay important to Metallica, the box-sets, the whole area of collectability. And bundling all these formats together will probably be an important part of what they do now as well. ’Cos why not? Choice right across the board will be the thing to do.’

Only seven artists have sold more albums in America than Metallica. Three of them – The Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd – are officially defunct. Of the others – the Eagles, Aerosmith, the Rolling Stones and Van Halen – while they still tour and record sporadically, all can now be considered nostalgia acts, great to see, but no longer considered in the vanguard when it comes to making new music. Until recently Metallica was the sole exception. Not just touring and recording but still considered vital, even important. For how long that will continue, however, only time will tell. At this stage, it hardly matters. Their appeal will remain undimmed. Will there ever be another band like Metallica, or is that world gone for ever now? ‘That’s a very, very good question,’ says Bonutto, ‘and I think as time goes on the answer to that is looking increasingly like a no, and that the real rock monsters, of which Metallica are a latter example, just aren’t being replaced.’ Because of that, Metallica ‘are becoming increasingly valuable as festival headliners, and album makers, because there’s people that want to buy it and there’s a lot of them. And that’s increasingly rare in the music industry. The industry’s now working against bands like Metallica existing and creating what they’ve done over that long a period of time. So this may well be the thing that’s not going to be replaced, which makes them like an endangered species and hence incredibly special.’

And what, one wonders not for the first or probably the last time, would Cliff Burton have made of his band’s travails in the wake of his unexpected leave-taking? Received fan wisdom has it, of course, that Cliff would have been outraged by some of the changes Metallica has been through; that he was a musical fundamentalist who would have kept the band artistically pure and that there would have been many more albums as wonderfully unique to the band’s original vision as Master of Puppets and Ride the Lightning. That is to overlook the fact that Cliff’s own musical tastes were always so much broader than the heavy metal – let alone the even narrower thrash – spectrum allowed. That he was a lover of Lynyrd Skynyrd and R.E.M., Kate Bush and the Velvet Underground. That he worshipped at the vocally harmonic temple of Simon & Garfunkel and was still a devoted student of the most godlike musical genius of them all, Bach. Cliff was no fool, either, and had been thrilled to pieces when the band finally began to make money, immensely proud of that success and as hungry and determined to sustain it as the rest of them. Ultimately, we will never know what Cliff Burton would have made of the way their worlds changed after the Black album. It might just as easily be argued that he would have been the first to embrace the massive changes they made, encouraging them to even greater feats of musical cross-pollination. Metal bands aren’t supposed to evolve: AC/DC, Black Sabbath and Iron Maiden sound basically the same now as they did on their earliest (still best) recordings. One gets the feeling Cliff would have railed against