From Metal To Main Street

"You think one day some fucker's gonna tell you, 'You have a Number One record in America,' and the whole world will ejaculate," Ulrich says with a sardonic laugh. "I stood there in my hotel room, and there was this fax that said, 'You're Number One.' And it was, like, 'Well, okay.' It was just another fucking fax from the office.

"It's just really difficult to get excited about it," Ulrich continues. "We've never been really career-conscious. We never tried to be Number One. But now we're Number One and it's, like, okay."

"I never pictured in my mind what having a Number One album meant," admits Newsted, "because I never thought it was possible to have a Number One record with the kind of music we played."

That, of course, is the beauty of it. Metallica, the scourge of the mainstream, begins its second decade at the top. It was not that long ago that the band was a genre unto itself — the lone messiah of speed metal, worshiped by a small but vocal congregation of disenfranchised hard-rock disciples unimpressed by punk and disgusted with the candy-pants sound of early-Eighties commercial heavy metal. It was only in 1988 that the members of Metallica graduated from street brats to chart terrors, blowing open the temple doors of the Top Ten with...And Justice for All's hurricane mosaic of bludgeoning guitar riffs, fiendishly complex time changes and Hetfield's hell-comes-to-your-house exhortations.

That it was Metallica, an album of shorter songs and heightened studio intensity, that turned the Number One trick is no great surprise. "This album is a little easier to listen to for people who'd never heard Metallica before," Hetfield concedes. It is, however, anything but a retreat from extremes. With Metallica, the band stripped back its songwriting to a brutish minimum, used a commercial producer, Bob Rock, to make its heaviest-sounding record ever and dared to get downright romantic in the ballad passages.

"I know we're Number One completely on our own terms," Ulrich says proudly, taking an afternoon tea break in the Saint James's Club's sun-dappled back garden (no ties required). "This whole thing was done our way. There is an inner satisfaction about that, to give a major 'Fuck you' to the business itself and the way you're supposed to play the game and the way we dealt with all that shit up through the mid-Eighties.

"I know there were a lot of bands who went, 'Oh, yeah, Metallica, they sell a lot of records, but they can't play or write songs,' " Ulrich adds. "I was just reading an interview with [the Cult's] Ian Astbury where he said going to a Metallica concert was one big wanking session with all these guys jerking each other off — and where's the femininity? Well, excuse me!

"So this is a big 'Fuck you,' not especially to Ian Astbury, but to all the people who felt that way for years and years and who came up and smiled to our faces, but as soon as they walked away, they were laughing at us — 'These guys, what's this thrash shit?' "