The Sandman Cometh

Last Sunday, Metallica played on the premises of a sports and education centre near the very obscure Swiss village of Jonschwil. I’m not an enthusiast, but the band rattled through selections from their early repertoire and “Cyanide” from their forthcoming album “Death Magnetic” with more aplomb and precision than I’d come to expect from Metallica. So it was easy to forget the fact that the tow-hour concert was a bit like a juke-box from hell that catered to an audience that had discovered Metallica in its youth and abandoned the band when James Hetfield, Lars Ulrich, Kirk Hammett and then-bassist Jason Newstead started straying from the narrow path they’d ploughed for themselves in the Eighties.
A few hors before the gig, I and two other journalists were due to interview Hammett, and when we were ushered into the designated interview space, we found it to be the music room of the school building that was serving Metallica and support act Within Temptation as a backstage refuge. Francois Barras from 24 Heures and I grabbed guitar and bass respectively and started jamming on the riff to Metallica’s “Enter Sandman”, and had the record company representative not intervened, we would have treated Hammett to a taste of his own medicine. Being professionals, we ceased and desisted, but I couldn’t help greeting Hammett with the opening shot that we were holding auditions and that he was on drums. The quip broke the ice, especially as I told him what we’d be messing about with, and Hammett responded by saying that that must have been the racket he’d heard coming down the corridors. He turned out to be a sweet thoughtful and terribly jet-lagged human being, but I still wish Francois and I had had the bottle to ruin “Enter Sandman” in his presence.