KIRK HAMMETT Says METALLICA Was 'Really Psyched' To Play 'Frayed' Live For First Time

METALLICA played the song "The Frayed Ends Of Sanity" live in its entirety for the first time ever on Wednesday night (May 28) during the band's set at the Sonisphere festival in Helsinki, Finland. The group had previously played the song's intro many times before, but always went from that into another track entirely. Wednesday night's performance was part of the band's "Metallica By Request" format for its current European tour, on which fans have selected each night's songs online.

"The Frayed Ends Of Sanity" is taken from METALLICA's 1988 fourth album, "…And Justice For All". Until Wednesday night, it was the last original song from the first five METALLICA studio albums that had never been performed live.

Prior to the Helsinki show, METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett told MTV about the "Metallica By Request" format: "It's really amazing because, at the onset of this, we thought that the fans would pick all weird stuff and kind of leave all the songs that we've been playing forever and ever alone, but as the results started coming in, people just voted for all the same stuff that we already played. Like, the top songs were songs like 'Nothing Else Matters', 'Enter Sandman', 'Sad But True', 'Creeping Death'… And in a lot of different places, it was similar, too, which was interesting to us. There have been, like, three or four songs that have come through that have been songs that we don't usually play, and we were hoping that we would get a few more of those types of songs, but we didn't. But when we looked at all the results — because we got the results before the tour started — we noticed that the most weirdest, most unusual request was from Finland, and it was for 'The Frayed Ends Of Sanity'. And we thought, 'Yes! We have a place where they actually wanna hear 'The Frayed Ends Of Sanity'.' Because we've never played that before. It was a song that we never paid much attention to, it's a pretty deep cut. So we've been rehearsing that song a lot, and we're gonna play it tonight for the very first time, and we're really psyched. I just hope that we'll be able to play it well, because it's so cold onstage. But yeah, I think it's gonna be pretty exciting, and it's gonna be a METALLICA first tonight here in Helsinki."

Bassist Robert Trujillo told CraveOnline.com last year that "The Frayed Ends Of Sanity" was METALLICA's "most challenging" song to learn on bass.

Drummer Lars Ulrich told the Delaware County Daily Times about playing the song, "We're going to have sit down and spin that one around for an hour or two."

METALLICA's setlist for the Helsinki concert:

01. Battery
02. Master Of Puppets
03. Welcome Home (Sanitarium)
04. Ride The Lightning
05. The Unforgiven
06. Lords Of Summer
07. ...And Justice For All
08. Sad But True
09. Fade To Black
10. Orion
11. One
12. For Whom The Bell Tolls
13. Blackened
14. Nothing Else Matters
15. Enter Sandman

Encore:

16. The Frayed Ends Of Sanity
17. Whiskey In The Jar
18. Seek & Destroy

METALLICA spent some time this spring working on material for the follow-up to 2008's "Death Magnetic", but the band's 10th studio album is not expected out until 2015.