Enter Night_ A Biography of Metallica - Mick Wall [76]
Introduced by Ron to Lars after the show, ‘Straight away we got on quite well so we stayed in touch.’ Nabbing a Metal up Your Ass T-shirt on the way out, Xavier had come back to Britain ‘and immediately started telling everyone at Kerrang! all about them. I wrote a “metal up your arse” feature and told Geoff Barton, “By 1991, this band will be the biggest band in the world.”’ Even though Burton and Hammett had yet to join the band, it wasn’t all just about speed, even then, says Russell: ‘What I noticed when I first saw them was that although they were playing fast you could still feel a tune in there. It definitely sounded European but it had an American slant to it.’ With the exception of Venom, it was ‘the most extreme form of metal I think I’d heard up till then – only better. Nothing against Venom, I quite liked them. But they were like listening to a cement mixer by comparison. Metallica always had a bit more of a tune to them, actual songs.’
While many would doubtless agree with that view, it would be wrong to dismiss the enormous part Venom played in laying the groundwork for what quickly became thrash. By the time Metallica released Kill ’Em All, the Newcastle-based band had already recorded three absolutely groundbreaking albums for the independent Neat label: Welcome to Hell (1981), Black Metal (1982) and At War with Satan (1983). Not only did they provide some of the musical footprints for Metallica to follow, they would also inspire their own self-ascribed genre, black metal, from which would come several notable acts over the next three decades. Beginning in the 1980s with, from Scandinavia, Mercyful Fate and Bathory – and in the 1990s those like Britain’s Cradle of Filth, who claimed to be actual occultists, and the ghastly Burzum, from Norway, who took the whole black metal shtick to a frighteningly literal new level with church-burning, the drinking of human blood and even murder in the case of Burzum frontman, Count Grishnackh (real name: Kristian Vikernes), who received a twenty-one-year sentence in 1993 for the murder of Øystein ‘Euronymous’ Aarseth of rival Norwegian black metallists Mayhem. Metallica never saw themselves as being as fixated on the rock-as-devil’s-music thing as Venom, but it was Venom’s utter determination to take metal music to a new, much more extreme level that allowed Metallica to see what could be done, given enough bloody-minded ambition. When Venom began, said frontman Cronos in 2009, they thought of themselves as ‘long-haired punks, ’cos that’s all we could associate [the music] with. But when we decided to start looking at terms like “power metal”, that’s when we started to call what we did the thrash metal, the speed metal, the death metal, the black metal. It was really just the black metal that stuck.’ Venom, said Cronos, was about, ‘going places where other bands hadn’t been’. Like books and movies, ‘Music should be so varied in subject too.’ There were, he said, to be ‘no rules to what we were writing’ – words that would be echoed more than once over the coming years by Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield…
Although ‘Whiplash’ contained the lines in its chorus: ‘Adrenalin starts to flow / You’re thrashing all around’, not even Lars Ulrich claims to know who first used the term ‘thrash metal’ to describe Metallica’s music. ‘Ask Xavier,’ he laughed. So I did but even he remains unclear on this point, saying only, ‘I think I did.’ But if he didn’t invent it, it was certainly Xavier Russell who did more than anyone else to popularise the term ‘thrash metal’. ‘I said [to myself], “How do you define this music?” I thought, “Well, it sounds thrashy to me.” Even if I didn’t say it to them, I wrote it down. Some people called it speed metal but then