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This week, Metallica’s WorldWired tour arrived in the UK for the band’s first major British shows since headlining 2015’s Reading & Leeds festivals – and it was every bit as epic as you’d expect. In Glasgow last night the thrash-metal titans came armed with a career-spanning setlist and an eye-popping stage production – here’s why you should beg, steal or borrow your way into the remaining shows while you still can…
The production is perfect
Metallica emerge at Glasgow’s SSE Hydro like grizzled prizefighters, via a long gauntlet that cuts through the crowd towards a specially-constructed stage in the middle of the room surrounded by baying fans on all sides, and disappear back down it two hours and twenty minutes later, having administered the final coup de grâce of ‘Enter Sandman’. The WorldWired tour features all the technological bells and whistles you’d expect from a Metallica show, but the 360° stage is arguably its best special effect: the sound quality may be dirgey at times, but the performance itself has a kind of pugilistic intimacy, as though you’re watching them play in Lars Ulrich’s garage – or, more accurately, his helipad.
The new material (mostly) kicks ass
The eight-year gap between ‘Death Magnetic’ and last year’s ‘Hardwired… to Self-Destruct’ was the longest of Metallica’s career, and perhaps indicative of their ocean liner-esque turning circle: as anyone who’s seen ‘Some Kind of Monster’ will know, this band are prone to crippling over-analysis. Thankfully, ‘Hardwired…’ itself proved to be worth the wait, and old-skool cuts like ‘Atlas, Rise!’ and ‘Spit Out The Bone’ slot seamlessly into the setlist – although if we’re splitting hairs, James Hetfield’s sales pitch could use a little work. “I love the new album,” Papa Het earnestly informs the crowd at one point. “I was…
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