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image of trad-metal. Increasingly taking their cue from Cliff Burton, whose moth-eaten cardigan and bell-bottom jeans were already a trademark, by 1983 Metallica wouldn’t have stuck out in any denim-bedraggled student union bar. Says Armored Saint’s John Bush, ‘Metallica were the ones who said we’re just coming out in the way we dress as we do backstage, which was refreshing at that time, because everything was about image and what people were wearing. I sometimes think that the worst aspect of heavy metal is the imagery. It’s the one thing that keeps heavy metal from maintaining a certain level of complete integrity. It’s like punk rock has always had a little bit more integrity than heavy metal because of the image. That was one thing that Metallica changed that was really important.’

Comics – another abiding Burton and Hammett obsession – became another thrash signifier. First this was as reading matter and occasional inspiration for lyrics, and then it was a pointer for turning record sleeves away from the staid sword-and-sorcery, clenched-cleavage clichés exemplified in the artwork of every metal band from the Scorpions to Whitesnake, towards the new 2000 AD comic-consciousness of the mid-1980s. Here, as with skateboarding, Anthrax quickly climbed aboard the bandwagon, or at least went out of their way to telegraph their interest, with Scott Ian claiming in interview to consume seventy-five new comic titles a week, focusing on ‘old Marvel stuff, and anything by Frank Miller and Alan Moore’. Anthrax drummer Charlie Benante, meanwhile, was a talented penman who drew the inner sleeve cartoons for their 1985 album, Spreading the Disease, then imitated 2000 AD’s original Judge Dredd artwork for their 1987 single ‘I Am the Law’.

Of course, it’s easy to arrange the pieces into a discernible pattern now. Speaking to me more than a quarter of a century after the fact, however, Lars Ulrich insisted there was very little design to this. Thrash was simply ‘something that happened sort of magically. It wasn’t something that was thought about; it wasn’t something that was planned [or] contrived. I don’t have the fucking answer more than anybody else, but to me, what thrash became musically was the Americanised version of what [Britain] experienced in ’79, ’80 and ’81 with Iron Maiden and Saxon and Samson and Girlschool and then everybody in the wake of that – the Diamond Heads, the Angel Witches, the Savages and so on. And in some way Motörhead floated around the outer fringes of that, even though Motörhead of course weren’t really a NWOBHM band, but there was a link to them. And then you could almost say that maybe the Judas Priests and the Scorpions were the bigger brothers or something like that.’ He added, ‘Nobody knew that this thing was gonna be what it became. The big bands [in 1983] were still the Scorpions and Judas Priest, Iron Maiden and AC/DC. That was a whole different level. We took our cues from all those bands. Then there was the American X-factor, whatever that was, and then it sort of became thrash.’ He went on, ‘I mean, if you sat down with [Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer] and everybody else…It’s all the same food groups and all the same places that it came from. When we first met Slayer they were playing Deep Purple covers. When I first met Dave Mustaine, the band that he was in was…a very different thing. The Anthrax guys – a very different thing. I mean, they were heavily into Judas Priest and that type of stuff. [But] we all sat there and shared our Diamond Head records and our Motörhead records and all of a sudden Venom showed up with Welcome to Hell and it was, like, fuck! And then Mercyful Fate! Do you know what I mean? Then thrash came out of all that.’ The crucial common ground in the original thrash scene for Lars, he said, was ‘that it was American. Thrash metal, at least initially, had a geographical element also that people don’t really mention.’

Geoff Barton concurs. ‘It was obvious from day one that the whole thrash thing was going to explode in the coming years. But we always saw it early on, certainly