• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 322 0

a UK tour in their own right, Metallica’s new UK agent, Neil Warnock at The Agency, had gambled on the appeal of a package featuring all three, putting together a hugely ambitious list of dates that was to climax with a show at London’s Hammersmith Odeon. Says Hooker, ‘It shows you where we were with this at the time because The Rods were gonna be the headliner.’ There had to be some last-minute quick-thinking, however, when the tour was scrapped due to an embarrassing lack of ticket sales. Thrash metal, as an established genre of music, may have begun to achieve recognition in Kerrang! but it was still very much a marginal concern everywhere else. For once, however, the fans in Europe were ahead of the curve. Instead, at Hooker’s instigation, the band drove straight from their final show with Venom in Belgium, to Copenhagen, where they routined their new material at Mercyful Fate’s rehearsal space. A week later they were in Copenhagen’s Sweet Silence Studios, recording their new album.

Ask Marsha Z now how Metallica came to record their second album in Lars Ulrich’s hometown and she chuckles and says, ‘Why do you think?’ But there were sound reasons, too, why Metallica should record in Copenhagen. First and foremost, cost: with the band using a disused upstairs room at the studio to sleep in, there would be no hotels to pay for. Secondly, they would have use of the skills of the studio’s twenty-six-year-old co-owner Flemming Rasmussen, whose production work on Rainbow’s 1981 Difficult to Cure album, also recorded there, had been a big favourite of Ulrich’s. Determined not to find themselves in the same situation as they had on Kill ’Em All, fighting every day to get their opinions across, they decided they would produce the album themselves – with the ‘technical assistance’ of Rasmussen.

Already a married man with a four-year-old son, Rasmussen offered Metallica the best of both worlds: young enough to get where they were coming from musically, expert enough in the studio to help them achieve the effects they desired. With a broad musical background in everything from rock to jazz, folk and pop, Rasmussen was also a fast worker who spoke the band’s language – literally, in the case of Lars. ‘We always [spoke] Danish when we were together,’ he says now. It enabled them to ‘talk without people knowing what we’re talking about’. But while working in Copenhagen suited Lars, says the producer, ‘I don’t think the other guys were too keen about it.’ The first time any of the others had left America, touring Europe had been an eye-opener; odd food, weird beer, different languages, but fun, travelling from strange new place to place every day. Now, holed up in a big wooden, converted factory, as far from home as they had ever been, sleeping all day, working all night, the fun factor was hugely diminished. This was hard work. Still winter, dark and cold out there, none of them could be bothered to stay awake long enough to explore Copenhagen, beyond the occasional foray to drink Elephant beer at a nearby bar.

Work in the studio would begin at seven o’clock every evening and would carry on until four or five in the morning, with a break for a meal around midnight. Flemming admits that at first the music seemed unusual to him. ‘I hadn’t heard a lot of that stuff in Denmark at that time. But I really liked it. I thought it was pretty brilliant, actually.’ The only immediate problem was that James was lost without his usual guitar amp, a modified Marshall that had been stolen when the band’s equipment van was broken into outside a gig at the Channel Club in Boston, in January. The thieves cleaned out the whole van, leaving behind just three guitars. Recalls Rasmussen, ‘Nobody knew what had been done to it. So we actually started out by getting every single Marshall amp that was in Denmark at that time and [placing it] in the studio, and James would start fucking around with it.’ The producer indulged his new clients. He had no intention of attempting to reproduce what he saw as the ‘pretty crappy’ guitar sound on Kill ’Em All. When,