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off the ground properly, Martin knew, would be to get them in front of a live audience. ‘In those days touring was one of the few ways you could successfully promote the acts. Unlike now, there were no metal TV shows, hardly any chance of radio airplay and no chance of [mainstream] press.’ Spending the significant amounts needed to bring an American band to Britain at a time when hardly anyone outside the hardcore metal scene was yet aware of them was a risk, though. His hand was all but forced, however, when Jonny Z made it apparent there might not be a second album – unless he could find a partner to come in and help finance the project. Says Hooker: ‘Jonny had run out of money. So he did a deal with us that we’d pay to record the album. We were still only getting the UK and Europe but we were kind of helping [Megaforce] out as well.’ There would be no kickback from Megaforce’s US sales, ‘But it kind of all worked itself out because we [eventually] sold shed-loads of records, so getting the money back wasn’t a problem.’

The new deal also led to Metallica spending most of 1984 actively promoting themselves in Britain and Europe. The plan, as hatched by Martin Hooker, with the encouragement of Lars Ulrich and Jonny Z, was that the band would record their second album in Europe, while also testing the waters with some exploratory UK and European dates. As with their earliest shows on the East Coast, they would begin with a handful of reasonably high-profile support shows, opening once again for Venom on their quaintly named Seven Dates of Hell tour, which began on 3 February at the Volshaus in Zurich, and continued through Germany, France, Belgium and culminated with Metallica’s first outdoor European shows at the Aardschok Festival in Holland on 11 February and the following afternoon at the Poperinge Festival in Belgium. The tour was a notable success, in terms of crowd response, with the band amazed to find their music was known to many of Venom’s ardent fans. Jeff ‘Mantas’ Dunn recalled their first gig in Zurich as ‘like National Lampoon’s Vacation. Metallica went fuckin’ nuts on the first night.’ When one of the band broke a window to talk to some of the fans, ‘the promoters had decided that they were gonna kill them for damaging the venue’. The band ended up hiding in Venom’s dressing room, ‘like little rabbits caught in the headlights’.

Certainly Venom felt they had given Metallica a significant helping hand in not only introducing them to such large crowds on their first trip to Europe, but also in legitimising them through their association at such a crucial early stage in their career – a fact that Conrad ‘Cronos’ Lant now feels is unfairly overlooked in the Metallica story. ‘We always wanted to help other bands,’ he later told Malcolm Dome. ‘Had we left everything down to the suits there would never have been a Metallica support.’ As the years went by, however, Metallica ‘just totally forgot all about the fact that we gave them the support on the Staten Island shows in ’83 and that we also gave them a full European tour. We don’t want a medal for that, guys. We just want you to tell it the way it is.’ According to Venom drummer Tony ‘Abaddon’ Bray, it wasn’t just profile Metallica picked up from their association with Venom. ‘I would swear that [James Hetfield] suddenly started to walk like Cronos,’ he said in 1996, getting up and mimicking the trademark, loose-limbed Hetfield swagger. In the same interview, Lant claimed that Kirk Hammett had learned to play by getting Joe Satriani to teach him early Venom numbers such as ‘Die Hard’. He rolled his eyes as though that explained everything.

The Venom dates were to have been followed by Metallica’s first UK tour, second on the bill, sandwiched between The Rods, three albums into their career but living largely now on reputation alone, and Canada’s first self-styled thrash metal act, Exciter, whose debut album, Heavy Metal Maniac, released on Shrapnel some months before was then only available in Britain on import. Knowing none of the three would be able to headline