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listening to the father. ‘I have an obsessive personality,’ he would later recall. ‘When I was nine years old, it was all about Deep Purple.’ As he got older, he would stake out the band. ‘I would spend all my time sitting outside their hotel in Copenhagen, waiting for Ritchie Blackmore to come out so I could follow him down the street.’ When, nearly thirty years later, I asked the now grown-up, father-of-three what his favourite album was he had no hesitation. ‘My all-time favourite is still Made in Japan,’ the double live Purple collection from 1972. The first show he ever had front-row tickets for, though, was Status Quo, at the Tivoli Koncertsal in Copenhagen, in 1975, which he later described for me as ‘a bit of a mind-fuck’. He was eleven and all he could think of was how he had gotten there. ‘How did I get so close? Were any of the drunks that had come over from Sweden gonna beat me up, or even worse puke on me?’ So close to the stage Lars could barely see up to where the band was standing mere feet away, Quo frontman Francis Rossi ‘looked like a rock god, over ten feet tall, with five feet of long hair and a Telecaster that looked like a kick-your-ass weapon’.

He began hanging out at Copenhagen’s best-known album-oriented record shop, the Holy Grail, where ‘the guy who worked there was my hero’, introducing him to then less well-known rock artists such as Judas Priest, Thin Lizzy and UFO. He would fantasise about being in his own rock band, write down names of songs and album titles in old school exercise books, living in his own make-believe world of rock stardom. Rock music became the one thing the increasingly independent youngster didn’t feel required to share with his parents. It also provided company for a solitary child growing up on the road, surrounded by kindly tennis ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’ and accustomed at home to plenty of arty elders who let him do as he pleased. As Lars later told the writer David Fricke, ‘From that point of view it was a pretty open upbringing.’ It meant, though, that he was expected to fend for himself in this bohemian atmosphere. ‘I always had to wake myself up in the morning and bike myself to school. I’d wake up at 7.30, go downstairs, and the front door would be open – six hundred beers in the kitchen and living room and nobody in the house. Candles would be burning. So I’d close the doors, make breakfast and go to school. I’d come home and have to wake my parents up…’ While this made him ‘very independent’ it often left him quite lonely. ‘As far as my parents were concerned, I could go see Black Sabbath twelve times a day. But I had to find my own means, carrying the paper or whatever, to get the money to buy the tickets. And I had to find my own way to the concert and back.’ The passion for loud, heavy rock – music that more than matched his outgoing, room-filling personality – continued throughout his early teens, and although his future was still bound to the same tennis courts his father had become famous on, that dedication slowly began to ebb. This process speeded up when, aged thirteen, his grandmother bought him his first drum kit – not just any beginner’s kit, either, but a Ludwig: drummer gold in rock circles.

Given his extrovert personality and, some would say, over-willingness to be the mouthpiece for Metallica, I once asked him why such an obvious frontman had ended up at the back of the stage as a drummer. ‘Well, there’s just one problem,’ he chortled. ‘I couldn’t [sing]. I mean, when I tried to sing in the shower it bothered me. And so if I couldn’t even capture an audience of one in the shower, you know, I realised that was not gonna happen. And I just always loved drumming. I mean, I can’t remember ever having a conscious moment where I sat there and said, “Being a drummer and having my Type A personality is kind of gonna clash.” It just never dawned upon me that I would not be able to be myself. That whole thing of like, oh my God, if you’re a drummer you have to shut up and only speak when spoken to and hang out in the background. That never registered on