METALLICA's LARS ULRICH On The 'Strangest' Time He Has Ever Had At A Festival

In a brand new interview with The Guardian, METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich spoke about the band's upcoming appearances at the Sonisphere and Glastonbury festivals, which will feature two very different headline sets — Sonisphere with the setlist chosen by fans, and then a straight-up Glastonbury set where a lot of people might be unfamiliar with METALLICA.

"It is good fun when one's setlist is taken away from you, for somebody who likes to control his own environment like myself," Lars said. "I still get a chance to sequence it, thank you! But yeah, Glastonbury will be a straight-up METALLICA setlist, whatever that may mean, since it's our first time playing there. I usually don't write the setlist before about 15-30 minutes before we go onstage, depending on what the mood is in the camp."

Asked about the strangest time he has ever had at a festival, Ulrich said: "The first time we played at Monsters Of Rock at Donington in 1985, there was a pig's head that was thrown up onstage while we were playing. If you just pause for a second and walk through that, step by step… like, just… first you gotta acquire a pig's head, which I guess you can maybe buy at a butcher's or slaughter yourself. Then you've gotta be motivated to carry this pig's head to the gig and keep it with you. Then you've gotta get it in the venue. Then you've got to get up to the front, still with this pig's head. And at some point, you've gotta launch the pig's head up onstage for it to land in close proximity to the singer. It was just lying up there for the better part of the set. It was a truly bizarre thing. And that was our first British festival experience. I'm not sure that anything has really matched that since on the bizarre scale, and that's 30 years ago."

METALLICA recently completed a South American tour where the band played a nearly all-request set, with 17 songs chosen online by fans prior to each gig and the last slot filled by the new track "Lords Of Summer".

That song is also featured in the set list for the band's current European festival run, on which METALLICA is repeating the "by request" format.

METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett said that "Lords Of Summer" is far from finished, telling Guitar World, "I didn't have time to work out the guitar solo in 'Lords Of Summer'. The solo that's on the demo track was all we had time to do... If you compare the solo in the demo version to what I've been playing live at those South American shows, it's a lot better and more refined now."

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