In truth, they’d said everything that needed saying in the opening act of their career. In the present tense, creatively at least, Metallica are dead behind the eyes. The only problem is that the pick of these songs are now between 20 and 40 years old. For up to $7,272 per seat, ticketholders can watch Metallica in state of the art surroundings – an oval-shaped stage, circular screens affixed to giant towers – playing songs representing the very best that truly heavy music has to offer. Inevitably, in the fleeting moments by which concerts are defined, and remembered, it is still quite the show. After wrapping up in Arlington, amid what is supposed to be a world tour, they will appear in concert a mere 34-times before the end of September next year. Today, the band plays live only two nights per week. At his insistence, 20 years ago Metallica’s set-lists were trimmed from three hours (or more) to 120-minutes. Once a vessel of volcanic intensity, today the 60-year-old “Papa Het” is an avuncular dancing-bear who will play and sing and phone it in whenever the price is right. This cratering creativity can be blamed, I think, on frontman James Hetfield. The kindest thing I can say about it is that at its best – on If Darkness Had A Son, say – it sounds like the work of a halfway decent Metallica tribute act. With its random speculative stabs at the characteristics that once made them great, it’s the kind of record made by the kind of band that has fallen into the habit of operating on autopilot. Despite a ritual thumbs-up from a compliant and supine rock press, at almost 80-minutes the quartet’s recent album, 72 Seasons, is overlong, overwrought and deeply ordinary. Up close, I’ve witnessed their “dominating flurry” dozens of times. I’ve seen them warm up in an NFL team’s locker room, and in an equipment truck in Istanbul. At a warm-up show at the 1,000-capacity LA2 club on the Charing Cross Road, nine years later I witnessed what the group today describe as the best gig they ever played. I first saw Metallica as a 15-year-old seated in the second-to-last row of the Hammersmith Odeon, in September 1986, just six days before bassist Cliff Burton was killed in a tour bus crash en route to a concert in Copenhagen. Prior to this, though, we went back a long way. In truth, Metallica have declined to acknowledge my existence since I reported that Ulrich had been accused of physically assaulting his personal assistant at 4am in the lobby of the Metropolitan Hotel, on London’s Park Lane, in 2008. I asked the group’s representatives to comment on this discrepancy, but to no avail. Just last week, on Instagram, a fan compared mobile phone footage of Lars Ulrich making a horlicks of the double-bass drum runs in One to the flawless execution heard in downloadable versions of the same concert released days later. So anyone wishing to hear Master of Puppets and Enter Sandman, for example, will be required to buy tickets for both concerts.Īll of which might be okay, in an expensive-night-out kind of a way, were Metallica’s powers not noticeably on the wane. They might also have added (but didn’t) that their best-loved songs will be rigidly quarantined. Long accustomed to serving old wine from new bottles – past marketing gimmicks include allowing fans to vote for set-lists, or performing their best-known albums in full – Metallica’s current ruse is to play entirely different sets over the two nights they appear in each city. (In 2022 it was estimated that Metallica had made a grand total of $1,219,599,179 from touring over the years, making them the top-grossing metal band of all time.) According to a cool assessment from co-manager Peter Mensch, this remarkable hike in entry charges was orchestrated with “very little pushback” from the group’s loyal constituents. A two-night pass in a so-so seat for the San Franciscan quartet’s upcoming appearances at Soldier Field stadium, in Chicago, will set you back $380, plus a further $106.82 in booking fees. In the age of streaming, Metallica have compensated for a shortfall in royalties from traditional record sales by ratcheting up ticket prices to a whopping degree. Not too long ago, you could see the band in person for that kind of money.īut not any more. In the UK, the price of entry for these bonanzas at (to pick a chain at random) Odeon picture-houses is £45 ($35) for both nights. On August 19 and 21, cinema-goers across the world will be given the opportunity to watch a pair of Metallica concerts filmed “as live” a day earlier in front of a combined audience of more than 160,000 people at AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas.
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