
Die, Die My Darling – originally by the Misfits “But when you hear it, you can really picture James singing it”ĥ. I’m not a big Bob Seger fan,” Kirk confessed at the time. Yet whenever any Metallicat talks about this road-weary ballad, they seem to distance themselves from its creator. Since garnering an unfair reputation for radio-friendly MOR, the Detroit singer-songwriter may have seemed an off-the-wall choice for Metallica in 1998, but this emotive ode to the road suited them perfectly James Hetfield said that the first time he heard Turn The Page, he swore Metallica could have written it. In an interview with Creem magazine just before he wrote this song for his sixth album, Back In ’72 (released in 1973), Bob Seger addressed why so few musicians had covered his material: “It seems like the only people who do my stuff are these really off-the-wall cats looking for really off-the-wall stuff,” he reckoned. “We might try to glue Sabbra Cadabra together with another Sabbath song.” In the event, A National Acrobat was plucked from the same album and interpolated into the mid-section, neatly seguing from a carefree song about shagging to some of Geezer’s weightiest lyrical concerns (although sadly this meant we didn’t get to hear James sing, ‘Lovely lay-yay-yay-yay-deh’). “It’s that opening riff that just really gets us going,” Kirk Hammett said in 1998, when Metallica were still in the studio playing around with the song. “ Geezer Butler is my favourite bassist of all time,” he told fan club magazine So What! “So needless to say, that was the shit, and the one that I tried the hardest to pay the most attention to be ultra-respectful on.”įrom the Brummie metal inventors’ fifth LP, Sabbath Bloody Sabbath, it was an unusually chirpy, loved-up rock’n’roll tune. This was the Garage Inc track closest to Jason Newsted’s heart. Sabbra Cadabra – originally by Black Sabbath I fully appreciate all that they’ve done for Diamond Head over the years.”ģ. Metallica are unrivalled in their field there is nobody even close. It was a brilliant show and I caught up with Lars backstage. In October 2017 I went to see Metallica on their Hardwired tour. How’s the relationship between Metallica and Diamond Head in 2018?


I had no idea of the potential of Metallica at this point, but I was flattered.” I was impressed that they’d gone to the trouble to work out, record and release one of our songs – even the solo was pretty much spot on. Then in November 1984 I got sent a copy of the Creeping Death 12” with Am I Evil? on the flipside. “In 1982 Lars sent a rehearsal room cassette of them playing It’s Electric. When did you first hear of Metallica covering Diamond Head? Everything before it was scrapped, but this had something special and entered our live set – not that we did many gigs then! It went down well live and was deemed good enough for our debut album. “This was our 45th song, written in June 1978. Can you remember It’s Electric taking shape?
