Metallica have bigger songs. They have better songs. But no Metallica song has had the same impact as the one that opened their game-changing debut album, Kill ’Em All. Four minutes and 17 seconds of suburban fury, Hit The Lights fired the starting pistol on the career of the most successful metal band in history and, by extension, invented modern metal as we know it.
If anyone can take credit for inadvertently galvanising both Hit The Lights and Metallica themselves into existence, it’s Brian Slagel. An LA fanzine writer and aspiring record label mogul with an ardent love of heavy metal, he’d met an exuberant, ambitious 17-year-old Danish ex-pat named Lars Ulrich in the parking lot of a Michael Schenker Group gig in Los Angeles in 1980. Lars hadn’t been in LA long, arriving there after abandoning his hopes of becoming a professional tennis player like his dad to pursue his rock’n’roll dreams.
