Their biggest song, Enter Sandman, doesn’t make an entrance, freeing-up space for lesser-spotted tunes such as the technically taut Blackened and the instrumental brilliance of Orion. Shaking things up, for this tour, the two gigs they’re doing at each stop promise no repeats from one night to the next, and thus a massive change from what has become the norm.

Occasionally a band guilty of derailing momentum through drawn-out showboating, from the opening stabs of the classic, speeding Creeping Death, they were a band reconnecting with the raw, kick-in-the-teeth intensity of much younger versions of themselves. It’s poetic, then, that as Download celebrates its 20th birthday, and this year Metallica mark 40 since their Kill ’Em All debut, it is they who are leading the festivities.įor all this occasion, the most striking thing here was how formidably direct Metallica’s attack was. As the San Francisco thrash metal legends closed the first night of Download Festival – the first of two headline sets they’ll perform over this weekend – their drummer and biggest cheerleader took to the mic to recall that Metallica first appeared here in 1986, at what was then Monsters of Rock, and have returned no fewer than nine times. “This right here may be Metallica’s home field.”

“You guys here in England have a thing called ‘home field advantage’, right?” enquired Lars Ulrich to some 80,000 people standing in front of him at Donington Park on Thursday night.

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