WALL OF DEAF

Amid a set of sold-out shows, Metallica take time out to visit China’s most famous landmark.

It took until the ’80s for rock music to genuinely arrive in China, with French electronic pioneer Jean-Michel Jarre playing shows there in 1981 followed by Wham! four years later. More recently, thawing cultural relations have seen other Western artists playing the People’s Republic, Metallica among them. Having first played Shanghai in 2013, they returned to that city this January before playing in Beijing for the first time. “Beijing has a very different energy to Shanghai. You feel you’re in the capital and it’s probably a bit more regimented everywhere you go,” says drummer Lars Ulrich, interrupting a band rehearsal for a show at the Royal Arena in his hometown of Copenhagen to talk to MOJO about the trip. Despite China’s increasing acceptance of rock music, Metallica were still bound by the state’s rules where certain topics – for instance, substance abuse and politics – are heavily censored, with lyrics by performers vetted beforehand. In Metallica’s case, it meant three tracks in their setlist – Master Of Puppets, Seek And Destroy and Hardwired – were forbidden. Ulrich is philosophical about this. “As you travel around this big wide world seeing all sorts of people, like we do, you learn about the things that work for you and you learn to respect the cultural differences that exist wherever you go,” he begins. “You go to certain places and they don’t want you to play with no shirt on. In other countries you can’t spit, so you don’t. I think we’ve learnt that you don’t have to be a rebel without a cause. You want to go to these places and play to the people that want to see you. We have over 150 songs we can just throw down so if we can’t play a few of them, then so be it.” As well as playing shows, the band’s Chinese sojourn saw them travelling for just over an hour from Beijing to visit the Great Wall. “Getting the chance to go was totally insane,” marvels Ulrich. “There were virtually no other people around because it was winter. Usually, during the summer there’s like 50,000 people per square foot or something like that, but we had the whole place to ourselves. It was weird to think that it was built in the 14th and 15th centuries and there we were walking along it. And it really is vast. You hear about it but you have no real idea what it’s like until you get there. It really is a total mindfuck!”

“CERTAIN PLACES, THEY DON’T WANT YOU TO PLAY WITH NO SHIRT ON.”