Author Discusses 'Metallica: Enter Night - The Biography' In New Interview

Brendan Crabb of Australia's Loud magazine recently conducted an interview with renowned British rock journalist Mick Wall about Mick's newly released book, "Metallica: Enter Night - The Biography". A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Loud: I've been reading the new METALLICA biography and what really struck me about it is how meticulously researched and detailed it is. Just how difficult was it to compile a book such as this one?

Wall: Incredibly difficult. It's like trying to travel across the desert; you start out with a map and a fair idea of what you need to do. Then you get about halfway through and you think, "Oh my God, I don't know where I'm going, I don't know what I'm doing, why did I start this?" (laughs). "I'll never do this again when I finish." But eventually you do get there. I think it's a bit like what people say about having kids — if you knew what was involved, you would probably never do it in the first place. But then once you start, there's no turning back, you know? Of course, it really is not just eventful and sometimes soul-destroying, but at the end of it, in the case of a book, you do have something to show for it. It took me more than a year to write the damn thing and 25 years to get to the point where I was able to write it. You do these books because you think you know something about it to begin with, but it's not really until you do a book that actually you know the story at all. So much of it, apart from interviewing people, researching and reading all the other books, going back and revisiting the music and your memories — and I've known these guys for more than 25 years. A lot of it is actually just thinking, trying to think clearly. It's so easy just to repeat the same old guff that other people come up with, including the band. You know, the band have got used to coming up with the same old stuff year in, year out (that) they even believe it. Stuff like, oh, after Cliff (Burton, bass) died, the band carried on because that's what Cliff would have wanted. You find yourself going to write that, before you suddenly think, "Hang on a second, is that true?" And actually, of course, it's not fucking true. The band carried on because that's what James (Hetfield, vocals/guitars) and Lars (Ulrich, drums) would have wanted. So you have to kind of think, you really have to try and rid yourself of the clutter of all these years of people talking nonsense and giving the band the benefit of the doubt at every turn. Conversely, even those bits where the people who say they were bad guys, like with Napster. Again, you have to kind of really try and clear away the clutter and see what you actually really think about it. In the case of Napster, there's no doubt that they were absolute fools to go about that the way they did. I mean, threatening to sue more than 300,000 of their own fans — I mean, how ridiculous can you get? But when you actually research it and look into it, you discover things that people don't talk about, like the fact that Napster were actually so antagonistic, refused to discuss the thing, insisted on going to court and in fact were even more bolshy about it than METALLICA. You discover that at the time they launched that action against Napster, they had recently sued six, seven, eight different people, all of whom were absolutely trying to rip the band off, from people selling METALLICA perfume to people selling bootleg albums. So you have to at every turn, you can't just re-tell the story as it's been told again and again. You really have to go, "Actually, let's pretend this is the first time anybody's heard this. What really happened?" So that's kind of what keeps you going during the months where you think you must be a nutter to have even attempted it (laughs). It's the fact that you're trying not just to re-tell the same old crap, you're re-telling it as far as you can for the first time, you know?

Loud: Would you say this was the most challenging biography you've written then?

Wall: Definitely. Before this, the most challenging was LED ZEPPELIN. I mean, I never thought I'd finish that bloody book — it drove me insane. It was a similar thing; again, I thought I really knew quite a lot of the story before I wrote the book. But it wasn't until I got down to it and started spending months and years actually putting it all together and trying to think about in the same way. "Oh, ZEPPELIN died because (John) Bonham died." Bullshit. If Bonham had died after the second ZEPPELIN album, there's no way they would have folded. They'd have just carried on without him, you know? But the fact is they were already dead as a group by the time Bonham died and it was just the kind of last straw. So, that was a kind of mind-boggling thing. Then after that I thought, "Well, what do you do after LED ZEPPELIN? Is there another story out there as good as that one?" In fact, yeah, of course there are. METALLICA is comparable… I mean, you have the death of a very important member and you also have this other dimension which ZEPPELIN doesn't, which is the fact that they've been together for 30 years and haven't finished yet. Whereas ZEPPELIN packed it all into ten years and never came back. METALLICA have proved to be a stronger band than that; they're never going to go away now, they're like a franchise, they're with us forever now. So yeah, it took longer than ZEPPELIN, which I could not have imagined when I started it. And it was a longer, more complicated story than ZEPPELIN and very hard to get right. Someone talked to me first about doing METALLICA back in 1995, and if I'd done the book then it would have been a much more straightforward proposition with a fairly happy ending. As it is, thankfully there isn't necessarily a happy ending, there's a kind of unresolved feeling to it. The band have really been through the mulberry bush and back again, you know, in terms of hating each other's guts, in terms of stabbing each other in the back and in terms of going through drugs and drink and everything else — divorce, death. But unlike ZEPPELIN, surviving it and coming through it, bizarrely, even stronger.

Loud: Indeed. The introductory stories you placed at the beginning of each paragraph recall some amusing anecdotes, as well as detailing the progression of your relationship with the band. What was it like reliving some of those memories?

Wall: Really good, actually. When I did the first one, which… All these years later, I'd never really… I had to check my diary; I still have my diary from 1986 and the only reason I checked it was 'cause of this book. It was only in checking the diary (that) I realized that my mum died like two days after Cliff did. She was 48 when she died, which is younger than I am now. I was 28 and it was an enormous event for me; so much so that I… Really, Cliff dying, I remember the ads in the magazines, I remember people talking about it. But it totally didn't touch me at all — my mind was gone at that point. I mean, bumping into Lars on the steps of the Hammersmith Odeon and him berating me because I hadn't seen their show (laughs); I had no idea what the fuck he was talking about at the time. But it wasn't until all these years later, a quarter of a century later, that I was able to put it together really. It was only through writing and trying to think of an evocative way of beginning the book that that kind of came together. Then other bits, where I'm trying to talk to Kirk (Hammett, guitars) about essential oils and he's nattering away to me about it, then suddenly James is there and he gets all really embarrassed because it's such a kind of gay thing to be talking about. James was really hardline in those days; you didn't talk about shit like that in front of James, you know? All those memories really weren't grouped together in my mind at all as meaningful or coherent or dots that you could join together to make a picture. It was only in doing the book and thinking, "Do I have enough of these kinds of memories and stories to do this little fancy thing at the start of each chapter?" Actually, yeah, and there were loads more, some that I didn't use. They were the most fun for me to write, to be honest with you, because everything else you've got to check your facts. You've got get your facts straight; was it on February the 14th or February the 15th? Was it a good album or was it a bad album? You really have to be as on the money as you can with everything, knowing somewhere you're going to make a mistake without realizing it. You have to try really hard. With the memories, they're just memories so they're my memories. So it doesn't matter if Lars remembers it differently or Kirk remembers it differently or James or whatever. That's how I remember it and so they were the most fun to write. There was no checking involved; it only had to matter to me. I think you get something out of it that you don't get in the rest of the book.

Read the entire interview from Loud magazine.