When heavy metal wasn't enough, there was Thrash. It was louder, brasher, angrier, the jeans were tighter, the hair longer. Like a junkie, suddenly normal metal wasn't enough. I needed faster, harder, more more more. I needed Metallica...
By now there was a little gang of us, all dressed in black, hanging around on park benches and drinking cheap cider on a friday night. We swapped tapes of new bands, pored over Kerrang, Metal Hammer and occasionally hung out at one of my rich friends house who had MTV and watched Headbangers Ball. Seek And Destroy was our anthem, we used to sing it drunkenly much like a generation later, other, similarly drunken fools would sing Oasis tunes.
Thrash bands tended to have slightly different concerns to more traditional metal. In the 80s especially, the fact that govenments were corrupt, that pollution would kill us all or if it didn't then nuclear war certainly would. It fitted perfectly with trying to find a world view as a teenager - even if to my more jaded ears now some of it seems hilariously unsubtle, but then to be fair, metal as a genre is hilariously unsubtle.
Metallica are now more famous for being grumpy old men who hate file sharing, acting like primadonnas on documentaries and generally being the kind of people who the Metallica that recorded Kill Em All would have hated. I think that there is a lesson in that, but I'm not sure what it is.
However, Seek And Destroy, and pretty much all of the first 3 Metallica albums, are just about as good as metal ever got. And if you can't find something to love there, there really is no hope for you...
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