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By Root 393 0

I thought they sucked.’ He concedes, though, ‘I guess the speed of the songs may have been an influence.’ Not just the speed but their fiercely uncompromising, entirely antisocial tenor, exemplified in songs such as ‘Sons of Satan’, ‘One Thousand Days of Sodom’ and ‘Angel Dust’. A trio from Newcastle formed in the late 1970s and similar to Metallica in that they had a burning desire to take the influence of Motörhead, Judas Priest and Black Sabbath and essentially speed it up, by 1982 and the release of their second album, Black Metal, Venom’s frenzied shows were attracting a frightening mix of headbangers, bikers, punks and skinheads. Combining ‘the big pyro show’ of Kiss with ‘the satanic lyrics’ of Black Sabbath, as their bassist, vocalist and lead songwriter Conrad Lant, a.k.a. Cronos, explained in 2009, Venom’s credo was bite-size simple yet shockingly effective: ‘Metal is the devil’s music, let’s make it as aggressive as we possibly can.’ The extra twist: where Sabbath-era Ozzy Osbourne was always being ‘a tormented soul chased by demons…Venom wanted to be the demon’. The impact of Venom was such that it would help a whole new genre of rock to evolve in the USA; one which Metallica would be credited for inventing, though, as Lars says now, the real credit lies with the melting pot he and his bandmates were beginning to stir up together. ‘A band like Venom had a lot to answer for. Because there were a lot of the songs on their first record that were very fast. Then you say Venom, then okay maybe throw a little Discharge in there, then you throw a little GBH in there. All of a sudden you got a little bit of punk, a little bit of metal, a little bit of Motörhead, who sort of had one foot in each world, then you add the American X-factor – and there you have thrash!’

While the formula may have been as straightforward as Lars suggests, the long-term effect was something not even he could have predicted. As such, the arrival of Metallica, and with them this new phenomenon called ‘thrash metal’, was a watershed moment in rock history: the end of heavy metal as it had become, post-punk – either lugubrious rhythms dredged from a river setting the scene for jiggery-pokery lyrics about Satan and his followers, or self-conscious anthems full of whinnying guitars and blow-dried vocals – and the beginning of a whole new thing that began by offering an alternative to the staid old ways and ended up replacing them. Thrash discarded those clichéd images of heavy metal as readily as punk, but kept the muscle and musicianship. Punk was about singles; thrash about albums. After that the two had more in common than not; dressed down in street clothes, determinedly proletariat, its appeal lying far beyond the remit of the pop or rock mainstream. Compared to anyone who had gone before, Metallica were closest to Motörhead in terms of stripping back rock to its most vital components. But there was a comic aspect to Lemmy and his man-boys, a knowing wink, a glint of the gold tooth that Metallica did not share. Lars and his guys were far more earnest in their musical endeavours, dressed head to foot in black, building their songs into musical movements before they could barely play their instruments. Metallica was a more purist experience and to be a thrash fan meant taking the music to a far more serious level: closer to the deep emotional abyss of Dark Side-era Pink Floyd or the self-absorbed self-righteousness of the early Clash. Not quite as bleak as Joy Division, but then Joy Division didn’t come from sunny southern California where the light is so bright it bleaches the shadows. So while Metallica, and with them the template for thrash, would include some of the old-school rock trappings – show-stopping drum displays, cartwheeling solos on a Flying V, even the occasional power ballad – regular rock fans instantly recognised them and it for what they were: something new, something different, something less instantly likeable but perhaps more ultimately meaningful. In time, thrash would become successfully commodified and labelled – it