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  The Metal for Muthas tour which followed, was more representative and featured Maiden, Praying Mantis, Tygers of Pan Tang and Raven, all bona fide members of the NWOBHM elite. Then Maiden guitarist Dennis Stratton, who’d only just joined the band, told me he was ‘shell-shocked by the response [the shows] got from their fans’. He went on: ‘Musically, it was bordering on punk rock…the audience was just fanatical. To me, it was all heavy metal music, but for some reason the fans could pick out that Maiden were different.’ Fellow Maiden guitarist Dave Murray remembers it as ‘people just waiting for the tour to arrive. It felt like the punk thing was kind of coming to an end and there was this gap and that everybody was just waiting for something to happen again. And it was great because rock was supposed to be dead, you know, but the reality was there was loads of kids out there who were coming to the shows or forming their own bands.’

  When the self-titled debut Iron Maiden was released in the spring of 1980, it leapt straight into the UK charts at Number Four. As a result, import copies started flooding into the USA ahead of its official release there later that year. Out on the West Coast, Lars Ulrich was one of the first to buy one. As he told me: ‘I was getting Sounds sent to me on a weekly basis, and I was getting care packages from [independent NWOBHM specialist label] Bullet Records.’ The NWOBHM, ‘just gave a new spin, a different kind of edge to traditional long-haired rock music. I mean, I was a teenage Deep Purple fan from Denmark who thought it didn’t get any better than that, you know, who was then suddenly thrown into this whole NWOBHM thing, and it sounds weird, but basically it changed my life.’ The only snag: ‘There was no one I could talk to about this stuff. It was always awkward for me when I landed in LA.’ Enrolled at Backbay high school in Newport Beach, he was the foreign kid with the funny accent and weird taste in clothes and music. ‘It was literally five hundred kids in pink Lacoste shirts and one guy in a Saxon T-shirt – me. I didn’t like to get beat up. I wasn’t like one of those guys. I was more like a loner. I was an outsider – doing my own thing, living in my own world and sort of not really relating to anything that was around me, in school or in Newport Beach’ where he now lived with his family. NWOBHM was ‘heavy metal played with a punk attitude’, he insisted. ‘My heart and soul were in England with Iron Maiden, Def Leppard and Diamond Head, and meanwhile I’m sitting here in this barren musical wasteland of Southern California being bombarded with REO Speedwagon and Styx. I had all the merchandise sent over from England. I’d walk around school with a Saxon T-shirt on and people would look at me as if I was from another planet.’ He had tried to integrate himself into the local scene, he said, going to see Y&T at the Starwood club in Hollywood just before his seventeenth birthday, but the only real friends he found he could relate to – that even knew what it meant when he walked in wearing a Motörhead or Maiden tee – were those he corresponded with via the then-emerging cassette-tape-trading scene.

  Finally, Lars made contact with some new, like-minded buddies in the shape of two slightly older rock fans from Woodlands Hills named John Kornarens and Brian Slagel. ‘John was a big UFO fan,’ says Slagel now, ‘and we had gone to see [former UFO guitarist] Michael Schenker play at the Country Club, in Reseda. This must have been in about December 1980. After the show John was in the parking lot and saw a kid wearing a Saxon European T-shirt. Now nobody, aside from me and him, knew who Saxon even was in LA, let alone had a European T-shirt. So John ran up to him and said, “Wow, where did you get that shirt?” I look down the road and there’s this little guy with long hair and a wrinkled Saxon T-shirt on,’ Kornarens later recalled, ‘so I went over the way. Lars was all excited ’cos he thought he was the only one in LA. So we started talking about the NWOBHM and the next day or the day after I’m round at his house for like a NWOBHM marathon.’ Soon their nerdy little gang was joined by fellow LA-based NWOBHM anoraks such as Bob Nalbandian, Patrick Scott and, further afield, Ron Quintana in San Francisco and K.J. Doughton in Oregon, all of whom would make small but important contributions to the early development of Metallica. ‘Obviously there was a lot of innocence,’ Lars smiled, when I prodded him for more memories in 2009. ‘There was a lot of youthful energy, there were a bunch of kids that came from all over the place that probably shared one thing in common [which] was that they were all outcasts and were all loners and had a difficult time fitting in with the kind of American way things were supposed to be – with school and goals and dreams and all this crap, right? And that we all found music and we all got off on the same things, which was this incredible thing that the British press had kind of [invented]. And I mean that in a positive way. We all believed in what this whole thing coming out of England was. Also because…it united us, and it was something that was taking place far away, so it made it more exciting. It wasn’t immediately accessible, physically. It’s very easy to kind of dream yourself into that whole state. And the New Wave of British Heavy Metal did that for many of us.’

  ‘We just thought he was some crazy Euro-metaller,’ says Ron Quintana, who first met Lars at the end of 1980. However, Ron and his ‘Golden Gate Park hilltop’ friends soon ‘came to respect his knowledge of bands we’d only read about or more commonly only seen logos of and suspected were heavy…[Lars] knew his shit early on and was an expert on newer bands to me’. Brian Slagel, who these days runs his own successful Metal Blade label, had discovered the NWOBHM through the tape-trading scene, which he’d first gotten into at high school, swapping home-made bootlegs with an increasingly wide range of fellow fanatics. Eventually, ‘I would trade live tapes [with people] all over the world,’ he says now. One of the people he regularly traded tapes with was in Sweden and it was he who sent him a live AC/DC show, which he also stuck some stuff ‘by a new band called Iron Maiden’ onto the end of. ‘It was The Soundhouse Tapes, three songs stuck on the end of the AC/DC stuff. I was like, “Oh, wow! This is awesome! What is this?”’ Brian began pumping his Swedish pen-pal for info, heard about the NWOBHM, then started buying import copies of Sounds, ‘which you could get at one of the local record stores’ to find out more. Soon he had amassed an impressive second-hand knowledge of the emerging British scene and begun to share his newfound spoils with other friends. To begin with, ‘There was me, my friend John Kornarens and Lars,’ he recalls. Once a week they would set off together to visit all the independently run record stores they knew that sold import copies of this decidedly non-American rock. ‘There were only like three or four stores and sometimes they would be an hour away from each other [by car]. There was Zed Records [in Long Beach]. Moby Disc [in Sherman Oaks] was another one closer to where I lived. And there were a couple of others I can’t remember the names of now’ including ‘a store in Costa Mesa, which was really far. We’d all drive in one car and we’d have to go pick up Lars, who lived in out in [Newport Beach], driving all over the place. Lars was from Europe and knew stuff that we didn’t know and we had stuff that he didn’t have, so the three of us just became really good friends based on our love of that whole NWOBHM scene.’ Lars was sixteen; Brian and John were eighteen. But Lars was the one who appeared to have the edge. ‘He was this crazy little kid with this endless amount of energy. We’d drive up to one of these record stores and he’d be out of the car and in the metal section before I could shut off the engine. When he was into something, he was into it a thousand per cent.’ Lars was so far into the NWOBHM scene ‘that he wanted to be a part of it’.

  Patrick Scott, a year younger than Lars but – because of the Danish schooling system – in the same grade year at high school, had heard of ‘this little Danish kid’ long before he’d met him. ‘We’d all go to this place called Music Market,’ he recalls. Scott and his friend Bob Nalbandian ‘would go, and we’d say “Did you get the new Kerrang!?” And they’d say, we got one copy but this little Danish kid already came in and bought it. We’d say, who is this guy? ’Cos he beat us to it every time. Or we’d be looking for new [UK import] singles on Neat [Records] and they’d say “The Dani
sh guy was here and he got it.” And we’d get frustrated but we wanted to meet this guy. We were just hungry to meet people that were into this stuff.’ When they eventually met via the small ads of a Los Angeles free sheet music paper named The Recycler, Patrick phoned Lars, who told him: ‘Come on over.’ Says Scott, ‘He had an amazing record collection that I drooled over and we became friends. He would come over to my house and watch the tennis. We were like one of the first families to have cable, so he’d come over to watch it and hang out with my family and things.’ Another member of the clique, Bob Nalbandian, now a writer and DJ, recalls how Lars, not merely satisfied with cruising the indie stores for new records, was also a prolific collector of mail-order imports. Once, when Lars ordered a copy of Holocaust’s ‘Heavy Metal Mania’ twelve-inch, he offered to grab one for Bob, too. A month later, Bob got a call from Lars telling him that the records had finally arrived and to come over and pick his up. ‘I go, “Great, I can’t wait to hear it,”’ Bob recalls, ‘and he says, “Yeah, but there’s a problem – your copy of ‘Heavy Metal Mania’ got taken out of the wrapper and left on the stove.” Note he said your copy! So my copy got warped. So I get in the car and drive seventy miles to his house just to hear it and it’s awesome. I wasn’t going to argue with him about my copy being all screwed up. I’m, like, “Where am I going to get another copy of ‘Heavy Metal Mania’?” There were two copies: Lars had one and I had the other one. So I got my mum’s ironing board out and tried to get it back into shape.’

  Lars would make his friends tapes of highly prized rarities by groups such as Crucifixion, Demolition, Hellenbach, Night Time Flyer – ‘all this NWOBHM stuff,’ recalls Patrick Scott. In return, Scott was able to introduce Lars to bands like Accept from Germany and a next-generation outfit from Denmark named Mercyful Fate. Lars, who had met the band but never heard one of their records, was deeply impressed with their first four-track EP, simply titled The Mercyful Fate EP, also sometimes known as Nuns Have No Fun. He begged Patrick: ‘I’ll trade you anything of my collection for it!’ But Patrick, who was equally anal, wouldn’t trade. The band Lars really fell for, though, was Diamond Head, who contained some of the edginess of classic NWOBHM bands like Iron Maiden, but incorporated it into distinctly old-school rock motifs, borrowed almost entirely from old gods Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple and Black Sabbath. Lars had first come across them via a tape of their early single, ‘Shoot Out the Lights’, which he regarded as ‘good but not outstanding’. When, however, he read in Sounds about the band’s independently produced, mail-order album, Lightning to the Nations, he couldn’t resist sending off a cheque and ordering a copy. He later gleefully recalled how ‘each copy was signed by one member of the quartet and it was pot luck whose autograph you ended up getting’. Lars, who had the luck of the devil, ended up with the handwritten signature of the band’s singer, Sean Harris – a rare prize indeed for the NWOBHM devotee.

  However, a long delay in the album’s arrival at the Ulrich household resulted in Lars striking up a correspondence with Linda Harris, Sean’s mother and then co-manager of the band. ‘She wrote really nice letters to me [and] sent me embroidered patches and singles – but still no album! Finally, in April 1981 the white label arrived and the riffing and freshness just amazed me.’ So amazed was he, in fact, that Metallica would later play live – and, later still, record – five of the album’s seven tracks, including ‘Am I Evil?’, ‘Helpless’, ‘Sucking My Love’ and ‘The Prince’. In particular, he was enthralled by a track called ‘It’s Electric’, which he had already heard a version of on another would-be NWOBHM compilation called Brute Force. ‘That was fucking unbelievable!’ he said. ‘If you take a look at the sleeve of the record now and compare the photo of Diamond Head with all the other groups there, they had an attitude and a vibe about them that none of the others could match. There was something special about Diamond Head, no doubt about it.’ Any secret thoughts Lars had of becoming a musician himself were still held in check, though. Certainly, none of his collector friends had any inkling yet of his ambitions to form his own world-beating NWOBHM-type band. ‘There was no mention initially that Lars wanted to form a band,’ says Brian Slagel. Then one day at Lars’ parents’ house Brian noticed there was a drum set ‘that was not put together, just sitting in the corner [in pieces]. He was like, “I’m gonna start a band” and we’re like, “Yeah, right, Lars, sure.”’

  But when Brian Slagel started his own fanzine, The New Heavy Metal Revue, he began to feel like he should hurry up and do his own thing too. ‘There were so many great bands that I just loved, I kind of thought it was an interesting thing to do something like that,’ Slagel says now. ‘There was nobody over here in the US that really knew anything about any of these NWOBHM bands.’ The first issue was ‘thrown together for fun’ in early 1981. ‘We just wrote some reviews and some things on Maiden and some US bands, and photocopied a few of them and tried to get them anywhere we could get them, basically.’ It was around this time that Slagel also started working at a local independent record store, Oz Records, where for the first time he came into contact with ‘a lot of the import distributors and stuff, so I had more of an avenue to get some distribution’. With the fanzine now on sale in the same independent stores that he and Lars had first gotten to know as fans hunting down import copies of NWOBHM records, the itch Lars felt to also somehow become more involved grew unbearable. It was now that he put his drum kit back together and really began practising again. The problem with being a drummer, though, is that you can only get so far playing on your own. You need other musicians to play alongside to improve your technique. Not having any musician friends remotely interested in the type of music he wanted to play, Lars tried seeking a solution to the problem by placing an ad in the classified section of local music free-sheet The Recycler: ‘Drummer looking for other metal musicians to jam with. Tygers of Pan Tang, Diamond Head and Iron Maiden.’ ‘This was like February, March of 1981,’ Lars told me. ‘And I was just manic and obsessive with all the stuff that was coming out of England, and getting all the singles and listening to all the bands, and doing all that stuff. And over the course of that spring, in 1981, I tried to find other musicians to kind of jam with and play full-on metal with. But that was pretty unsuccessful. And then I kind of got fed up with the whole thing and wanted to go and spend the summer in Europe.’

  Disillusioned with life in balmy Newport Beach, frustrated by his apparently futile attempts to find other like-minded souls to play his drums with, and, although he wouldn’t have owned up to himself about it at the time, desperately looking for something to fill the gap left in his – and his parents’ – life by his failure to make a go of a tennis career, Lars sought both a quick escape and, maybe, a more realistic chance of at least meeting others who felt the same way he did about music. Talking it over with his mother and father, they were, as ever, supportive. In Denmark they had allowed him to travel around alone. ‘In those days in Denmark, a child of eight or nine could take the bus to the concert hall and listen and then come back on their own,’ Torben recalled. ‘And then sometimes he would fall asleep on the bus and the conductor would say, “Now it’s time to get up and go home.”’ In that context, allowing your seventeen-year-old son to catch a plane across the Atlantic on his own was hardly a stretch – as long as he promised to write home and, when possible, phone, just to let his mother know he was safe, and with the unspoken agreement that when he returned he would at least settle on some sort of plan, whether that be going on to college or finding a proper job. Lars bought himself a return ticket to London and made ready to leave – alone.

  Then, just a few weeks before he left, ‘I got this call from this guy named Hugh Tanner who had seen my ad [and] he came down and we had a jam, and he brought this guy James Hetfield along…’ That first meeting did not go well, though. Hugh and James went down to meet Lars together. Unsure who was auditioning for whom, the first number they tried out together was ‘Hit the Lights’. Lars ‘had
one cymbal that kept falling over’, James recalled. ‘We had to stop while he fixed it.’ When it was over, he said, ‘It was, “What the fuck was that?”’ It wasn’t just Lars’ rudimentary abilities on the drums. It was ‘his mannerisms, his looks, his accent, his attitude’. Even, he said, ‘his smell’, reflecting on the difference between American shower-a-day standards of hygiene and Lars’ own more ‘European’ habit of going days without bathing, wearing the same shirt and jeans until they became stiff with sweat. As far as James Hetfield was concerned, Lars might have stepped off a spaceship. A stranger in a strange land, there was no way he could see it working out between them.

  Lars was also less than impressed. James’ singing voice in those days had yet to evolve into the ferocious growl it’s now famous for. Instead, he sang in an affected, high-pitched aggro-castrato, part Rob Halford, part Robert Plant, part strangled squeal. Lars was also put off by what he perceived as the frankly unfriendly vibe emanating from the singer, who hardly spoke and refused even to make eye contact. His first encounter of the man who he would later characterise as ‘the king of alienation…almost afraid of social contact’, Lars went away that day utterly disillusioned. ‘We had a jam and not much materialised,’ he told me, ‘and I got kind of pissed off with the whole thing.’ Not with playing, but with the idea of ever finding anyone in America to play with. Instead, he reverted to another plan he’d been hatching: to leave America behind and return to Europe. Not to Denmark, but to Britain, ‘where the action was’. When, with the same incorrigible panache he had exhibited in his days waiting in hotel lobbies for Ritchie Blackmore’s autograph, he wrote to Linda Harris and asked if he might come and visit her and her son one day, and maybe come and watch the band play, Linda breezily agreed, never expecting the enquiry to go any further than that. But then she had never met anyone quite like Lars Ulrich.