Four decades on, the heavy metal titans are unfazed by saggy skin and double chins. These monsters of mayhem are growing old noisily.
A couple of weeks ago I listened to the latest Metallica album turned up to 11. The riffs are relentless. One track is called You Must Burn! The lyrics to another go: “Demonised, liquefied, tranquillised, prophesied!” So far, so heavy metal. But there are also a lot of melodies and choruses. You do not sell 125 million albums without being able to surprise — and write a hook.
Later I meet Lars Ulrich, Metallica’s drummer and band spokesman, given that the singer James Hetfield is stage-loud but interview-shy. The pair turn 60 this year, so I start by asking if their pummelling, punishing music is not for younger ... “Let me confirm,” Ulrich interrupts, laughing, “that the idea I’m sitting here at 59, talking about our 12th record, 41 years after we started, is obviously preposterous.”
These days the band embrace ageing. “Saggy skin? Double chins? Whatever! None of this fazes me. I don’t have a need to put on a crazy tight leather jacket, dye my hair and convince the world I am 30. I’m comfortable in my body and have no desire to chase the fountain of youth,” Ulrich says.
No wonder he feels settled. Metallica are the 36th best-selling act in history, above Prince and the Bee Gees. They are a remarkably stable group, formed by Ulrich and Hetfield in 1981, with the guitarist Kirk Hammett on board since 1983 and the bassist Robert Trujillo for 20 years. The so-called Black Album (1991), with the single Enter Sandman, was their monster hit, but that barely scratches the surface. Master of Puppets, their “eight-minute super-heavy metal song from 1986″, was recently a Spotify download topper after featuring in Stranger Things on Netflix. The band headlined Glastonbury in 2014 and the millennial pop star Phoebe Bridgers covered them.
Ulrich is the group’s celebrity. Friends with Bono and Noel Gallagher, he’s the prophet who first pointed out that, maybe, giving away music online was not a sustainable business model. More on that later, but first the new album, 72 Seasons. Few musicians have a deeper bond with their fans. Sure, the hair has changed — Ulrich and Hetfield used to wear it below their shoulders, both now style it like a pair of edgy car salesmen — but that aside, if it ain’t broke, don’t play it quieter.
“When we’re in a room together it’s not radically different to 1981,” Ulrich explains. “Are there better microphones? Newer cymbals? More amplifiers? Of course. But the enthusiasm has not changed.” Neither has the ferocity of Metallica’s music nor their penchant for singing about darkness and depression. After a mellow(ish) phase at the turn of the century, the band have returned to thrash metal (heavy metal but faster).
Hetfield says that 72 Seasons — the number of seasons in our first 18 years — is about “sorting out childhood as an adult”. Via email he says: “There are some things you can’t unsee and are with you for the rest of your life.”
But, I ask, don’t such fears dwindle when you become old and incredibly rich? “I’d say the opposite,” he replies. “I feel like an old version of the awkward loner kid I always was. People say, ‘Come on, look how successful you are!’ But success doesn’t change you. For better or worse you carry formative years with you and I’m more aware of the darkness than before. When younger I was in such a hurry — hellbent on the next stimulation and the next beverage. I never slowed down enough to understand what was going on around me. But, as you age, that becomes more obvious.”
Ulrich sips his tea. The heavy drinking is over. He quit cocaine years back. People change. Now Ulrich collects art. Hetfield is a beekeeper. The drummer is at home in San Francisco, the band’s base. Ulrich was born in Copenhagen, before he moved to California in 1980 to pursue a tennis career that soon lost out to a different kind of racket.
All this seems a world away from Metallica’s 1983 debut album, Kill ‘Em All (originally they wanted to call it Metal up Your Ass). Their ascent was fast and furious and studded with Spinal Tap moments: Grammy-nominated in the 1980s, they played the first open-air gig in the former Soviet Union in 1991. The cover art on their 1996 album Load was made from squishing blood and semen between glass slides. They even went on to make albums with the San Francisco Symphony.
Then in 2004 the band had a documentary of their own: Metallica: Some Kind of Monster. It focused on the band inviting a therapist to deal with issues during the making of their album St Anger. It is a riveting watch: a prototype for the Beatles’ Get Back, where a group falls apart in front of the cameras. Yet Metallica are still here. How?
“We all would rather be in Metallica than not,” Ulrich says. “Ultimately it’s about preserving the mothership. Think of what we’ve been through! We’ve played, what, 3000 concerts? Age helps, but it is pure love for the other fellows. We know each other’s trigger points so well. But none of us have the energy to make a record the way we did 30 years ago. I can still wind James up in 12 seconds, but knowing what it takes gives you the chance to stay clear of it.”
Being part of a heavy metal band is a weird job. Any of us can have a colleague for 40 years, but we do not jet off with them for months at a time, sharing each other’s socks. Ulrich and Hetfield started as friends — what are they now? Ulrich laughs again and reels off what Hetfield is to him. Brother. Partner. Colleague. Someone he sometimes doesn’t understand. He says their bond is like the one he shares with his wife and three children. But Ulrich has been married three times. There has only been one Hetfield.
Then we move on to the internet. Rewind to 2000, when the free availability of music online was new but rising fast, thanks to the sharing platform Napster. It was brought to Metallica’s attention that an unreleased song was on the network, so they took Napster to court for copyright infringement. The result was bankruptcy for Napster. Music fans blamed Ulrich for being very rich and supporting, boo hiss, “the Man” and the record labels.
He remembers the first time the internet had an impact — it was 1995 and Metallica were in London. “The day after a gig,” he says, “our tour manager said, ‘Do you want to see what people thought?’ He went to the computer. You could hear that dial-up tone. Half an hour later we were looking at some forum where 20 fans were talking about the show the night before. I went, ‘What the hell?’
“That changed everything. Back in the day you’d put a song out and only weeks later read a review. Today, after five minutes you have 37,000 reviews.”
Times have changed so much that Metallica previewed a recent single on TikTok. But the question, raised by Ulrich during the Napster furore, was about the value of music. Why would people happily spend £15 on three beers, but quibble at spending that on a CD with music that would last years?
“That is the core of the issue,” Ulrich says. “What is it about music — more than other intellectual property — that made people think it could be free? Maybe because we first listened to it on the radio? Certainly, at the start of the internet, there were so few laws that everything online represented freedom. I don’t know if, 20 years on, there’s any new clarity.”
I suggest it is simply that people were happy not to pay for music just because they could. Ulrich agrees. “We all want to intellectualise it, but the answer may just be, ‘It was there.’ More than anything [music piracy] was about the ease of it.”
The repercussions are still being felt. The collapse of physical music sales means that record labels do not have the means to back anything but surefire hits and so huge nostalgia acts like Metallica stay dominant. This month the band embark on a two-year world tour. They are unstoppable.
“If you look at your peers, so many fall away,” Ulrich says with a smile. “Most bands are in their twenties. Some thirties. Fewer forties. By the time that you get to your fifties, sixties or seventies it’s only a handful, because people can’t stand being in the same room together — but us?” He laughs last and, of course, loudest. “There is still gas in the tank!”
- 72 Seasons is out on Friday
Written by: Jonathan Dean
© The Times of London