When Ennio Morricone died in July 2020 at the age of 91, the world of classical music lost a giant. The Italian was one of the most important composers of the 20th Century. His music featured in countless movies, from Sergio Leone’s fabled 60s spaghetti westerns A Fistful Of Dollars, For A Few Dollars More The Good and The Bad And The Ugly to Quentin Tarantino’s The Hateful Eight. But he also had an unlikely connection to the world of rock metal world: he was the man who inadvertently wrote the greatest intro music in history.
That piece of music is The Ecstasy Of Gold, a song that has opened countless Metallica shows since 1983. Other bands have their own iconic intros to generate anticipation ahead of gigs. Iron Maiden have long used UFO’s Doctor Doctor, while Ozzy Osbourne kicked off his shows with Carl Orff’s dramatic Carmina Burana (as have several other artists). Nor are Metallica only band to harness the power of The Ecstasy Of Gold - punk legends the Ramones used it for years as outro music at the end of their shows, while it was sampled by hip hop superstar Jay-Z on his song Blueprint².
