Lead guitarist Kirk Hammett recalls how Metallica made the guitar album of the year – with songs pulled from the “rif f bank” and solos cooked up on the spot. He also reveals how he grabbed another prized guitar thanks to Joe Bonamassa, and how he finds inspiration playing along to birdsong and aeroplanes…
Metallica get the same 365 days as the rest of us, but something happens to them on a trip around the sun that spins time all out of proportion. More happens than seems possible.
When lead guitarist Kirk Hammett speaks to TG during a rare moment of respite from the band’s remorseless trek across the States, pillaging its largest stadia, he barely pauses for breath as he reels off the highlights from his year.
First, the M72 World Tour; two nights in a stadium, no two the same, with no-repeat setlists culled from the most formidable back catalogue in metal. The scale of these shows is on a different level to anything Metallica have attempted before, and the sheer size of the stage has meant that Kirk has had to find anew way of locking in with drummer Lars Ulrich. “We really had to change our whole approach to playing live because that stage is so goddamn big Iam literally 100 feet away from Lars,” Kirk says. “His hi-hat in the count? Sometimes I can’t hear that hi-hat but I can see it, and that is what I have to rely on, and that’s the case with all of us.”
The tour has included festival stop-offs, such as Download and Power Trip –that big shindig in the Californian desert with Iron Maiden, Guns N’ Roses, Tool, AC/DC and Judas Priest. Kirk has also enjoyed some extra-curricular live engagements: jamming onstage with Journey and trading licks with that band’s founder Neal Schon on their ’70s classic WheelInTheSkyand Metallica’s anthem EnterSandman; performing with Eric Clapton, Ronnie Wood and more at the Royal Albert Hall to pay tribute to Jeff Beck.
Then there are the guitars of 2023, with Gibson rolling out various replica editions of Greeny, the 1959 Les Paul Standard famously owned by the late Peter Green, latterly
