Universal hat soeben ein generisches Interview von Metallica und Lou Reed durchgeschickt. Das ist zwar vollkommen unexklusiv, aber dennoch interessant. Wie konnte es kommen, dass sich so viele alte Säcke zusammen tun und ausgerechnet einen Wedekind-Stoff ("Lulu") beackern? Leset (in Englisch).
New York’s finest, Lou Reed, is singing the praises of Metallica’s HQ in California. “Their magnificent studio is set up by musicians for musicians”, he says. “The things you waste a lot of time fighting over in a normal place? They don’t exist there. They don’t come up, because it’s clear who’s running the show: creative musicians. No vultures. It’s the most magnificent set-up for real power and feeling and emotion. Everybody’s in the room at the same time, the vocals, the drums, that guitarist at my hip for god’s sake, that thing blaring at me…”
“Hey”, laughs James Hetfield, “you were doing some blaring yourself!”
“Yeah, I was blaring back,” concedes Reed. “I didn’t come unarmed…”
Reed comes armed today with quips, enthusiasm and a busload of faith to discuss the collaboration that’s proving the most keenly-anticipated and talked-about of the year. The “Lulu” album, on which the some-might-say unlikely pairing of Reed with Metallica offers around ninety minutes of uncompromising, undiluted, unsettling and uplifting sonic art, is set to shift the boundaries of what we call rock. Both parties have previously made great leaps in that direction, of course. Today they’re happy to talk about a leap of willpower, which sees Reed’s words tumbling in and out of Metallica’s tunnels and tendrils of riffs, rhythms, dynamics and drones.
Lou Reed, James Hetfield and Lars Ulrich sit opposite me in a suite at London’s Claridges hotel. They’re eager to share their passion for their new project, affably complimenting each other with genuine bonhomie. Reed made immeasurably influential music with The Velvet Underground in the 60s, then became a shape-shifting solo star with albums like the Bowie collaboration Transformer, the monumental and macabre Berlin, the wallpaper-peeling Metal Machine Music and the street poetry of New York. He’s fused the literary and the lysergic, always diverse and demanding and defying stereotypes. Metallica, who formed in 1981, are the best-selling thrash-metal band in history (with over a hundred million albums sold), and have never been shy of twisting speed and volume into new shapes across seismic landmark albums like “Ride The Lightning” and “Master Of Puppets”. Many will be surprised by this titanic team-up, as Reed, for all his street smarts, has always nurtured an air of bookishness (alongside his instinctive pugnacity), while Metallica, it’s safe to say, have rocked hard with few pretensions. Yet look a little closer and the pairing makes perfect sense. Both parties have always been willing to touch on awkward topics like alienation, fear, sex, death. Here, they dive into…
“I wouldn’t call it the heart of darkness”, muses Reed. “I’d call it the heart of illumination.” He strenuously denies that the link-up is startling. “Why?” he asks. “An odd collaboration would be Metallica and Cher. That would be odd. Us – that’s an obvious collaboration.”
This joining of unstoppable forces makes for exhilarating news and an intense, incendiary noise, as two pioneers combine to deliver something darkly yet refreshingly different on both the visceral and cerebral planes. “Lulu” is a set of extended songs inspired by German expressionist Frank Wedekind’s early 20th century plays Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box (which were much admired by Sigmund Freud). The plays, originally published in 1904 and set in Germany, Paris and London in the 1890s, spin between the points of view of Lulu, an inverted-Eve-like cipher-mirror of desire and abuse, and the people who fall desperately in love with her. There’s plenty of sex. Then she meets Jack The Ripper. So there’s plenty of death too. “I have no real feelings in my soul/ Where most have passion I have a hole”, state Reed’s harrowing lyrics.
He had sketched out songs for director-choreographer Robert Wilson’s theatrical production of the Lulu plays – very controversial in their day and scarcely less so a hundred years on – in Berlin. “He asked if we were game,” says Ulrich, “and we’ve been forever touched and changed by the experience.” Adds Hetfield, “We thought: what can we do, what we can add to the potency of this, to take it to another level, make it heavy, make it rock?” “This is perfect,” says Reed. “The best thing I ever did, with the best guys I could possibly find on the planet. I wouldn’t change a hair on its head. By definition, everybody involved was honest. This has come into the world pure. We pushed as far as we possibly could within the realms of reality.”
Reed’s avowed aim has often been to set the spirit of Burroughs, Tennessee Williams, Selby and Poe to three or four chords, to marry the gutter and the stars, to fuse trash and majesty. “I harboured the hope,” he once said, “that the intelligence that once inhabited novels and films would ingest rock.” He added back then, “I was, perhaps, wrong.” Or, after this, perhaps he’s made it right.
These two musical giants first came together in October 2009, at the 25th anniversary Rock And Roll Hall Of Fame concerts in New York. Metallica – founder members singer/guitarist Hetfield and drummer Ulrich plus guitarist Kirk Hammett and bassist Rob Trujillo – played with the hometown hero Reed on Velvets classics “Sweet Jane” and “White Light/White Heat”. Reed pronounced, “We knew from then that we were made for each other.”
Lars recalls, “We were invited to host a segment at the Hall Of Fame anniversary bash: I guess we represented the outsiders, the left-field artists. At the top of our list to collaborate with was Lou, who is like a solo version of Metallica in a way. He’s always done his own thing, for decades, continued to reinvent himself, challenging not only himself but his fans. And it just felt right, effortless. So we ran with it, inspired. Then Lou threw out: why don’t we do more, make a record together? We had to run around the world and finish our Death Magnetic endeavour, and then we were ready!”
The original plan was perhaps less daring and bold: to revisit what Lars describes as “some of Lou’s lost jewels – songs that he felt he’d like to give a second spin, and we could do whatever it is we do to some of those songs.” That idea “hung in the air for a couple of months”. Then, just a week or so before the sessions at HQ were to begin, “Lou called up and said, “Listen, I have this other idea…””
“We were very interested in working with him”, says Hetfield. “I had these giant question marks: what’s it going to be like? What will happen? So it was great when he sent us the lyrics for the Lulu body of work. It was something we could sink our teeth into. I could take off my singer-and-lyricist hat and concentrate on the music part. These were very potent lyrics, with a soundscape behind them for atmosphere. Lars and I sat there with an acoustic and let this blank canvas take us where it needed to go. It was a great gift, to be asked to stamp ‘TALLICA on it. And that’s what we did.”
“Stamped?” chuckles Reed. “Branded! It’s in, and it’s not coming out…”
“This idea sounded like an even better situation for us,” suggests Kirk Hammett. “It gave us an opportunity to truly collaborate with Lou on something that wasn’t already established. We ended up writing and recording with him there and then, just like that, without a lot of afterthought or reworking. It was an exercise in spontaneity, in improvising: there are things we just could not recreate. We bowed to the magic.”
“My Lulu had a head but she needed a body. They said: let’s go, let’s do it, can’t wait. I’d been submerging my psyche in Lulu and the various characters, and in the studio we’d examine this further. It’s not always Lulu singing; in my mind I’m switching gears, characters. It’s not easy. It’s not a party record. It’s like: what happens if you try to bring the whole thing up a level? There’s an argument that if you have to think, you can’t rock. But the mind is the most erogenous zone I know, so that’s an unusually dumb comment. This is a new genre here, and we punch it out. This is where I like to exist.”
So how should we, as listeners, feel after hearing Lulu, with its graphic lyrics of jealousy, lust, violence and revenge, its grinding riffs and tantalising tones? Will it enchant or offend one or both sets of fans?
“It’s definitely not a Metallica album, or a Lou Reed album”, offers Kirk. “It’s something else. A new animal, a hybrid. Nobody in our world, the heavy metal world, has ever done anything like this.” “It’s made us a better band. It’s going to freak some people out”, says Rob Trujillo. “And that’s good. It could be disturbing. At the same time it could be beautiful. It’s a marriage of attitudes.”
Asked if the project took Metallica out of their comfort zone, Reed laughs, “Have you ever heard their “comfort zone”?” Lars beams, “We were inventing the wheel! We were psyched to be thrown into a situation with no specific structure. We’ve tried over the years in certain instrumental pieces to get as far “out there” as possible, but nothing we’d ever done prepared us for where this went. We spent four weeks in our studio: Lou showed up on the first Monday and by lunchtime we were deep in it, faster than anyone could keep track. It’s been an authentic, intuitive and impulsive journey. We weren’t always sure where it was going, but it sure as fuck was an exciting ride to be on.” “We all felt the same way”, nods Reed.
James Hetfield continues, “It’s so great to have another powerful force in the room like Lou. There was the feeling-out period, but soon – despite the fact that Metallica used to give me the nickname “Dr. No” – I couldn’t stop saying yes. I thought: we need to just agree that this is awesome. What’s steering the ship at that point? The moment is. As soon as we let go of that fear of no control, we were in Heaven. So many ideas, but all agreeing that this is magic, don’t mess with it. Celebrate what’s happening here…”
Lou Reed points to the extraordinary 18-minute track, “Junior Dad”. “There’s a one-note classical theme that goes on at the end of that, for some length of time. To my mind it becomes almost impossible to listen to any more. But it was, is, what it is. And so you don’t touch it. Not to the very last note. I would cut off a member to make sure nothing touches that, and that it expires naturally. That it goes where it goes. And since everybody felt the same way, this was not a big move. See, that’s the thing – we all felt the same way. There were thousands of happy accidents. It was just about our emotional responses, and an ability to play.”
“We embraced every moment of it”, says Lars. “Every moment.”
