Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [75]
Almost immediately a whole new generation of rock and metal bands strove to emulate both the re-energised Metallica sound and the downtrodden look of its band members, beginning in general with the increased speed and intensity of the new music they were already calling thrash, and specifically with the dry-as-sand downstrokes that Hetfield had unwittingly turned into its signature sound. Dave Mustaine, initially more famous for his frenzied solos – and his barbed anti-Metallica comments – was shrewd enough to include Hetfield’s rhythmic gimmicks in his own band Megadeth, as did Kerry King of Slayer and Scott Ian of Anthrax. These three bands, along with Metallica, would soon become known as the Big Four of thrash, and the arrival of Kill ’Em All provided the launch pad for them all, especially once the specialist metal press – led by Kerrang!, but quickly followed by the same fanzines that had already been supporting Metallica – got hold of the idea. As with the NWOBHM, suddenly thrash was depicted as a thriving scene unto itself, which had seemingly sprung from nowhere overnight. Or, as Lars Ulrich laughingly puts it now, ‘From the mind of Xavier Russell!’
The son of film-maker Ken Russell, Xavier was a public-school-educated English teenager who had fallen in love with heavy rock in general and Lynyrd Skynyrd in particular just as the rest of his friends were falling for The Clash and The Jam. Working as a film editor in his own right, he had began writing for Sounds in the late 1970s as a hobby, always in longhand, mainly reviewing heavy metal imports from Europe and America. Encouraged by the magazine’s deputy editor and eventual NWOBHM inventor and original Kerrang! editor Geoff Barton, by the early 1980s Russell would become the first writer to give the name Metallica serious media exposure in the infamously hard-to-impress mainstream British music press. ‘Xavier was the person in the Kerrang! office really promoting Metallica’s cause,’ says Barton now. ‘He would be banging on about them incessantly, to the point where you’d think, oh god, just to shut him up let’s give them a two-page feature. So it was a hundred per cent down to Xavier, a lot of their early coverage.’
Russell wasn’t a great writer but he was a major metal enthusiast and obsessive collector, in much the same way Lars and his nerdy teenage chums in California had been. When, in 1982, he was in San Francisco on holiday and noticed that Mötley Crüe – a new LA band he’d heard about but never seen perform – were playing at the Concorde Pavilion, he went along out of curiosity. Introduced at the gig to Ron Quintana, who handed him a copy of the No Life ’Til Leather cassette, he thought nothing of it (‘People were always sticking tapes of bands you’d never heard of in your hands at gigs’) until the following morning, still hungover, he popped the cassette into his Walkman, ‘expecting nothing special really’. He got a shock. ‘The speakers just went whoosh!’ He got as far as the second track, ‘The Mechanix’, before pausing the tape to phone Ron. ‘I said, “Where are this fucking band playing?” He said, “They’re playing Monday,”’ at one of the then-regular Metal Monday night gigs at the Old Waldorf. ‘I went and it was Metallica, Lääz Rockit and another band, and I was just totally blown away.’ At this point, Mustaine