He stepped forward and raised a hand.     

“If you came to see spandex and fuckin’ eye make-up and the words ‘rock’n’roll baby’ in every fuckin’ song, this ain’t the fuckin’ band,” he declared. “We came here to bash some fuckin’ heads for 55 minutes – are you fuckin’ with us?!”

So began Metallica’s performance at the fabled Monsters Of Rock festival in Castle Donington, on August 17, 1985. Almost 34 years later, James Hetfield chuckles at the spectre of his younger, wilder self.

“Oh, it was a war cry,” he says, settled on a sofa deep within Kansas City’s Sprint Arena, where Metallica will later play the 133rd date of the WorldWired tour, a marathon meander through the arenas and stadia of North America, South America, Europe, Asia and Oceania, that’s scheduled to conclude in New Zealand on Halloween 2019, three years after it began. “There’s no doubt about it, man. It was a jab at all the other bands, the bands we got energy from. We got energy from that. ’Cos we weren’t that. We didn’t want to be that. We didn’t want to listen to that – but we’re kinda being raised in it. So, it was a war cry to all our potential army out there to join us.”

It’s easier to call people to arms if you have a perceived enemy.    

“Absolutely. So, we’re extremely grateful for all that spandex and big hair, ’cos it definitely formed our style. We were anti- ‘it’.”

Hetfield’s massive frame stiffens slightly as he dispatches that last word with unsettling force. It’s a momentary flashback to a very different James Hetfield, the one this writer first met in 1991, shifting awkwardly in the lobby of a swish Manhattan hotel and wary of everything, from routine questions about his band to the drink in his hand. Back then, with Metallica poised to release their self-titled fifth LP – AKA ‘The Black Album’ – and transition from massive cult stars to colossal mainstream phenomenon, Hetfield was an edgy, reluctant interviewee, a walking glower who by way of conversational opener had declared his bandmate Lars Ulrich “a fucking little prick”, then became irritated at the bar menu’s insufficiently patriotic beer selection, and my choice of Heineken (“Nothing American? No Coors? Huh…”).

Today, however, Hetfield is Mr Congeniality. Metallica might have recently launched their very own beer, Enter Night, in collaboration with SoCal craft brewer Stone (“combines the beauty of a Northern German pilsner with modern overtones of aggression”), but you won’t see Hetfield drinking it: he’s been teetotal since a 2001 rehab, the ramifications of which almost saw Metallica break up, as infamously depicted in the film Some Kind Of Monster. He sports comfort-fit jeans and an olive green shirt, tattoos stretching above the neckline and below the sleeves. The blonde hair, which once roared in long leonine frenzy, is gently greying and allowed to relax into a sort of decommissioned quiff, that together with his droopy walrus moustache gives him the agreeable air of an oil baron who took early retirement and now gets to rock all over the world – playing fast, but at a sensible pace.

“Of course,” he chuckles, “now I wear spandex.”

The 1985 Donington line-up wasn’t quite the unmitigated orgy of Revlon and synthetic fibre suggested by James Hetfield’s exhortation. Indeed, that year’s event wasn’t officially billed as ‘Monsters Of Rock’ at all, but ‘ZZ Top Rocking The Castle’ in honour of the headlining Texan blues-boogie legends, at a commercial peak thanks to their MTV-powered ’80s makeover. Eyewitness accounts suggest the arrival by helicopter of Eliminator, the Top’s 1933 Ford Coupé, was the highlight of support act Marillion’s performance. Openers that day in the East Midlands were Birmingham stalwarts Magnum, whose prog-tinged AOR was chiefly notable for singer Bob Catley’s cavalier decision to wear white jeans, prompting some unfortunately accurate mud-slinging.

Metallica, meanwhile, were sandwiched between Ratt and Bon Jovi, a piece of scheduling guaranteed to stoke Hetfield’s ire. Ratt epitomised a primped and puckered glam metal that dominated the Los Angeles club scene when Metallica formed in 1981 and against which they self-consciously defined themselves. Metallica’s second ever gig was opening up for Saxon, exponents of the stoutly proletarian, resolutely un-glam New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, to which Lars Ulrich was devoted. The Barnsley quintet, still riding high on the success of their 1981 album Denim And Leather, had arrived on the Sunset Strip for a two-night stand at the Whisky A-Go-Go, and Metallica wangled the second night’s support slot; first night openers were Ratt.

Outsider products of suburban Los Angeles, albeit from starkly contrasting backgrounds, both singer-guitarist Hetfield and drummer Ulrich felt so estranged from their home city’s commercially-driven poseur shtick that in early 1983 they relocated to San Francisco. Four hundred miles up the West Coast, Metallica encountered a very different environment: metal gigs characterised by speed and aggression, the scene nurtured by a grass roots fan network whose musical touchstones were Motörhead and the NWOBHM. The band’s relocation was sealed by the replacement of original bassist Ron McGovney and guitarist Dave Mustaine with two noted players from the Bay Area, Cliff Burton and Kirk Hammett. In May 1983, this Metallica lineup recorded Kill ’Em All, a gauche but compelling synthesis of hard rock precision and hardcore punk energy into a new variant that would vanquish the poodle-hairs and fundamentally alter the complexion of rock: thrash.

As for Bon Jovi, Slippery When Wet was still another year away, but the New Jersey quintet already had its shiny template down pat, not to mention the dandified yuppie couture. No matter that Metallica themselves had occasionally been known to accompany their Motörhead or Iron Maiden T-shirts with spandex strides, at least until around 1983. By the summer of 1985, now signed to Elektra following the startling impact of second album Ride The Lightning, their studiedly adversarial stance was embedded. The night before they played Donington, Lars Ulrich told Kerrang journalist Mick Wall that his band were “in the mood to kill”. Hetfield, meanwhile, would replace the maker’s name on his new Jackson King V guitar with the inscription ‘Kill Bon Jovi’.

“We were fuelled by lots of contrary energy,” says Ulrich today, on the Kansas City interview couch. “I was 21, James may have just turned 22… We were different from everybody else that was mainstream. Of course, 34 years later, some of it can seem a little easy, cheap shots. But we were proud that we were offering something different, and we made no excuses for it.”

He laughs.

“Y’know, Jon Bon Jovi is a really nice guy. But we were pointing out different options. Different ways of looking at stuff. Different music, different things you could embrace other than what you were being fed by the mainstream music business, mainstream radio, the mainstream way of things. And Jon Bon Jovi was the poster child for that. You’d hear Discharge and you’re like, What the fuck?! That sounds really different to REO Speedwagon! And I like it! I don’t think anybody really wanted to kill Jon Bon Jovi – I certainly didn’t myself. But it was what he represented.”    

While everyone else on the bill at Donington in 1985 was either a nostalgic reflection on rock’s past or an indictment of its present, only Metallica offered a dynamic vision of the future. Four weeks later, the band began recording its third album, Master Of Puppets, a record that both underscored the sheer exhilarating physicality of thrash but also, in its musical sophistication and existential lyric themes, brokered Metallica’s eventual ascendance to another dimension. It made the US Top 30 without any radio play. The album’s inner sleeve photograph depicted Burton, Hetfield, Ulrich and Hammett in a scene of domestic squalor at 3132 Carlson Blvd, AKA the ‘Metallimansion’, a modest house in the East Bay suburb of El Cerrito where Hetfield and Ulrich lived, and where the band wrote and rehearsed. Beer bottles, overflowing ashtrays, ripped jeans, manky sneakers, Misfits T-shirts: this was not how million-selling rock bands presented themselves, according to the conventional wisdom in 1986. But in blurring the aesthetics, both sonic and visual, between metal and punk, between performer and fan, here was a portent of changing times.

“I remember watching a documentary on Bon Scott,” says Hetfield, “and AC/DC were playing somewhere with the band Trust. I saw Malcolm Young walk into the trailer, wearing a black shirt and black pants. He gets changed, he comes out, he has the *exact same thing on, and walks onto the stage. That was very impactful for us. It’s like, ‘Hey – be who you are.’”

Who or what Metallica are has been a matter of debate throughout the band’s near-40 year existence. Despite two ever-present founding members, personnel issues have been a persistent sub-plot. There are fans of a certain vintage who at best begrudgingly honour anything the band have done after the 1986 death of Cliff Burton, a hardline which thereby denies the two best-selling Metallica albums, 1988’s …And Justice For All, and its 16-times platinum successor Metallica. Former members Dave Mustaine (sacked, 1983) and Jason Newsted (quit, 2001) both departed in acrimonious circumstances, but have since enjoyed contrasting relationships with the band. Newsted, who replaced Burton within weeks of the bassist’s death and suffered the brunt of his bandmates’ griefthereafter, was present at Metallica’s 2009 Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction and played Enter Sandman amid a reunion of the ‘Black Album’ band, alongside his replacement Robert Trujillo. Mustaine, on the other hand, was not invited, and seems disinclined to let the matter drop. As recently as 2017, he was insisting his composer credits on the first two Metallica albums conferred de facto Hall membership.

Ulrich is philosophical. “There’s a particular sincerity when it’s just Dave and I together, often very warm. I’ve always liked that side of Dave. But other stuff gets in the way, and there’ll be a couple of years of posturing in interviews from both of us.”

But it’s Metallica’s ambivalent relationship with heavy metal itself that perhaps explains their conflicted perception among its adherents. As Ulrich notes: “There was always stuff that we found silly. The sword and sorcery business. I love Venom but I’m not going to do a photo shoot on a beach with 16th century weapons.”

Possibly the most contentious Metallica release, Lulu, 2011’s collaboration with Lou Reed, split opinion between those who hated it, and those who merely refused to consider it a *bona fide Metallica album. “What will our fans make of Lulu?” Hammett pondered to MOJO. “It really doesn’t matter. And I say that with so much love and respect.”

Having evolved a fresh code for metal, Metallica then broke ranks, loosening the thrash strictures to admit acoustic guitars, vocal harmonies, prog song structures, slowed tempos, ballads… and hit singles. Their speed peers – Anthrax, Slayer, and Dave Mustaine’s post-Metallica vehicle Megadeth – enjoyed the trickle-down benefits while broadly sticking to the purist path. Yet for Metallica, the post-‘Black Album’ trajectory through the ’90s and into the new century resembles a CT scan of self-doubt. The awkward alt-rock dalliance of Load and Reload (Short hair! Eyeliner! Weak songs!) fed into the imperfect storm that was St Anger: over two years in the making; written in the studio by a band without a bassist; whose singer quit for 12 months to undergo rehab; amid an internal dynamic so damaged that the band paid performance coach Phil Towle $40k a month to counsel them; and with every dysfunctional episode and hissy fit documented by a film crew.

“Obviously those were dark and bewildering days,” Ulrich says. “The best thing about that time was all that meltdown forced a redirection of the individual band members’ lives, then a bigger reset of the Metallica ethic. We had never prioritised our personal needs over the band’s needs. The band had always squashed the individual. The reason it works so well now is we know where our boundaries are, mentally and physically.”

Clearly, ‘Metallica’ is one of the most powerful brand identities in music. But has it ever felt like a burden?

Ulrich is thoughtful.

“I remember when [1992 ‘Black Album’ single] Nothing Else Matters was breaking in America. You’d get these updates, and you’d sit with the manager and talk about what was going on. Nothing Else Matters was being very well received at radio, it was all very positive…  (adopts Svengali-esque voice) ‘But if your name was not Metallica it would be an even bigger song.’ Oooo-kaaay…!” He laughs. “But I can deal with that! At no point in the past 37 years have I sat there and thought, We shoulda gone with ‘Thunderfuck’ instead. Or ‘Empty Barrel’, or ‘Helldriver’, or whatever other names we were thinking of. I’m perfectly fine with ‘Metallica’. If we’d gone with ‘Thunderfuck’ it would have been a whole different story!”

So baroque are Some Kind Of Monster’s layers of dysfunction that the film’s joyful moments are easily overlooked. Such as Robert Trujillo’s audition in April 2003, where the band, having interviewed the prospective new bassist – with the obligatory presence of their therapist – finally get around to some tunes. “I could try Battery,” Trujillo offers. Ulrich seems doubtful. Then we hear Hammett off-camera exclaim: “You can play that fast with your fingers?!” To which the pick-averse Trujillo replies “Yeah!”, then proceeds to drill Metallica through a full-tilt rendering of *Master Of Puppets’ thrash apex, a song celebrating the violence of the band’s early shows in San Francisco’s Old Waldorf club, located at 444 Battery Street: “Crushing all deceivers, mashing non-believers…”

The scene is even better when you know that Trujillo is monumentally hungover, after Ulrich had prevailed upon him to drink cocktails until 5am the previous night. “I think it helped me not to be nervous,” he later recalled. “I was brain dead.”

The recruitment of Trujillo, a supreme bass-player but equally importantly an old school Metallica fan, helped the band make peace with their past. Three years later, they toured Europe, playing Master Of Puppets in its entirety.

“I feel honoured to play Cliff’s music,” says Trujillo, sipping herbal tea in the Kansas City interview room. “I came into the band at a point where it was ready to dive into the older material and celebrate it. That [2006] tour helped cultivate the songs that ended up on [2008’s] Death Magnetic, there is a huge root from the tree of thrash, and Cliff, in that body of music.”

“St Anger wasn’t the most popular record we did,” says James Hetfield with a smile. “It was very cathartic for us, but we started to realise how much we cared about Metallica and how we weren’t the only people who cared about Metallica. I always felt looking at our past was the first sign of becoming lazy, or old, or irrelevant. Then when we did Death Magnetic with Rick Rubin, he said, ‘Think Puppets! Put on the clothes you wore …’ – they’re not gonna fit, dude – ‘what were you listening to, where did you live, what was the atmosphere…?’ Heheheheh! I understood what he was trying to get at. It’s our roots. But you can’t go back. They were so innocent, those times. Still, we tried our best. I think Death Magnetic is really strong. And I think Hardwired… To Self Destruct [2016] came out even better.”