“It really wasn’t any different this time than before – it’d basically be me and James sitting down with a bunch of tapes and sorting through the details of his ideas and Kirk’s ideas. “Most of the record was written in May and June of 1985, from the best ideas that were kicking around on our riff tapes from the previous year,” he continued. The whole band was getting more confident.” I guess we just had the right attitude and the right openness to ideas. “I would like to say that there was something magical in the air in the summer we wrote Master Of Puppets, something that hasn’t been there before and has never existed since,” Lars Ulrich told me ten years ago as I commissioned Machine Head, Mastodon, Trivium and more to re-record the album in its entirety for a 20th anniversary tribute. Upon its release, UK music magazine Sounds hailed the set as nothing less than “a landmark in the history of recorded music.” The first Metallica album entirely written by the four musicians who would record it, the songs on Master Of Puppets were assembled in the garage of 3132 Carlson Boulevard in the spring and summer of 1985 and presented to producer Flemming Rasmussen perfectly arranged in demo form before the quartet decamped to Sweet Silence studios in Copenhagen in late August to record it. On an album conceived around themes of manipulation and control, Metallica’s mastery of the form is absolute and unerring, the performances a peerless harnessing of power, dynamics and mood. has not diminished one iota with the passing of time. As enshrined in our culture as these songs have become, the impact of Battery, of the majestic, four movement Master Of Puppets, of the slow-burning Welcome Home (Sanitarium), the beautifully atmospheric, classically composed Orion and the punishing Damage, Inc. The phrase “hypnotising power” is an entirely apposite description of the effect of the 54 minutes and 46 seconds of sound contained on Master Of Puppets. Here, you instinctively sensed, was a band to believe in, one of us. Compared to the stylised, slick portraits of Iron Maiden which Halfin would shoot for the Somewhere In Time album, Metallica looked positively feral. The room is a mess, but with its Blu-Tacked Iron Maiden posters on the walls and crappy stereo in the corner, it looked not unlike my own teenage bedroom, while the four cocky, smart-arse kids on the sofa, in their ripped jeans, denim jackets and well-worn band T-shirts, looked not so very different from my dirtbag metalhead mates. Shot by photographer Ross Halfin in the living room of James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich’s shared house at 3132 Carlson Boulevard in El Cerrito, California, the image captures the four band members crammed together on a couch behind a coffee table atop which are strewn bottles of beer, the remnants of takeaway food, Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione’s latest soft porn mag New Look and the Jedition of the San Francisco Examiner, the above the crease type of which announces to its readers that ‘Hudson Has AIDS’.Īt one end of the couch guitarist Kirk Hammett points a beer bottle at Halfin’s lens, at the other, bassist Cliff Burton greets the photographer with a raised middle finger. In the pregnant seconds between the stylus dropping on the record and the opening acoustic flourishes of Battery spilling forth, one’s attention was drawn to the portrait of the band which adorned the album’s inner sleeve.
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