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It has become one of the most surprising and iconic images to have emerged from the Grammys in recent years: James Hetfield, barrel-chested and iron-lunged Metallica frontman, screaming into a microphone he’s sharing with generational pop superstar, Lady Gaga.

The duo, backed by the rest of Metallica, pillars of pyro and a gaggle of backing dancers as they rip through Moth Into Flame, have had to improvise after an almighty technical hiccup threatened to throw the entire performance into parody. Luckily, it all only serves to make an historic collaboration both more intimate and, somehow, more epic. Disaster averted, basically.

The unlikely team-up took place at the 59th edition of the music industry’s most prestigious awards show, which was held on February 12, 2017 at the Staples Center in Los Angeles.

On a night also marked by appearances by pop heavyweights such as Adele, Beyoncé, The Weeknd, Daft Punk, Bruno Mars and Katy Perry, Metallica’s one-song set promised to inject the evening with some much needed energy and heaviness, not to mention the fact that it’d involve one of the wildest partnerships in Grammys history.

Amazingly, the whole thing came together over just a matter of weeks, following a chance meeting between Metallica’s drummer and honorary motormouth, Lars Ulrich, and Gaga herself. “We were asked whether we would come and join the Grammys again,” Ulrich explained to Access Hollywood ahead of the performance.

“They encourage you to consider, ‘Is there some collaboration that you think would be cool?’ We said, ‘Let’s think about it.’ And so, I was at a dinner party [with Gaga], and we were sitting next to each other, and we were just basically talking, and I thought, ‘Wait a minute, this would be cool.’ So I said, ‘We’re doing the Grammys in a couple of months, do you wanna join us?’ and she was just, ‘Yeah, that would be great!'”

The dinner party in question was held at the residence of none other than Hollywood A-lister Bradley Cooper, who was in pre-production with Gaga for the film they were both starring in (and that Cooper was directing), A Star Is Born. “I was at Bradley’s house with Lars and we were just hanging out,” Gaga confirmed to Apple Music‘s Zane Lowe later that year.

The singer was also full of superlatives for Ulrich and his band, adding: “He’s amazing! I went to see them live, I’ve seen them a couple times live, but I saw them recently… and we were watching the show and I’ll tell you something, those guys play better than they’ve played in their whole lives.”

And so, a rehearsal studio in LA was booked for the weekend leading up to the big event, and Gaga and Metallica set about reimagining Moth Into Flame in a way that’d both suit its heavy roots while making the most of Gaga’s powerful, unique vocals and flamboyant sense of creativity.

“She was in there for two hours before we even got there, working on her moves and thinking stuff up,” James Hetfield told Howard Stern in 2020. “She’s extremely creative, and she’s a fearless artist.”

“She was telling me that Metal Militia, which is this deep cut on our first album Kill ‘Em All, was her favourite song back in the day,” added Ulrich. “She loves metal, has been very vocal about her love for metal all the time and would show up at Iron Maiden shows and Anthrax shows.”

Following a successful on-set dress rehearsal before the show began, the stage was officially set and the 59th annual Grammys were underway. And here, sadly, is where things started to go pear-shaped. On the same night that Megadeth were inexplicably played to the stage pick up their Best Metal Performance award to the sound of the house band playing Metallica’s Master Of Puppets, it seemed that Metallica themselves were also destined to be undermined at the Grammys – and not for the first time.

Around halfway through the evening, Orange Is The New Black actress Laverne Cox arrived on stage to introduce Metallica and Lady Gaga’s performance…only to forget to mention Metallica at all. Whoops! “I am so sorry to Metallica and all their fans,” Cox later stated on Twitter. “I am told I didn’t say their names during the intro. Love you Metallica. You Rock.”

The facepalms did by no means end there. As lashings of pyro burst out across the stage and the band kicked into Moth Into Flame, a metalled-up and go-go-dancing Gaga in tow, it soon became obvious that something was wrong.

Namely, James Hetfield’s microphone wasn’t working. While the band were clearly on top form, as the track’s first verse kicked into gear, the frontman’s voice was nowhere to be heard as he bellowed into the mic, a quick, confused glance to his side emphasising that he could tell something was up.

Gaga soldiered on, sounding great as she sung her parts, but by the time it came to Moth Into Flames‘ chorus, it was clear the issue was not getting fixed – almost ninety seconds into the song, and Papa Het was still singing his heart out to absolutely no avail.

“In the heat of the battle, you’re out there, you’re playing,” Lars Ulrich told James Corden on The Late Late Show a few weeks later. “When it’s a technical issue, you don’t really know. Is it going to the house? Are the vocals going to the truck? Maybe it’s just the monitor – so you just gotta keep playing.”

Thankfully, quick minds prevailed. Gaga, ever the professional, subtly beckoned Hetfield over, and the two sung the track’s chorus together on her mic, sharing it for the remainder of the performance. What could have been a total catastrophe ended up being saved at the last minute, and the rest of the song went by without a hitch – and, of course, gave us that iconic shot of the two vocalists side by side.

Sadly, the technical snafu had already done its damage as far as Hetfield’s mood was concerned; as soon as the performance finished, Metallica’s usually PMA powerhouse could be seen angrily throwing his guitar off stage. He was still fuming by the time the band got back to their dressing room.

“We get off stage, we get back there and I haven’t seen him like that in 20 years,” Ulrich revealed on The Late Late Show. “He was livid. He’s aged really well and is a pretty chilled guy – but the first five or 10 minutes in that dressing room was not a lot of fun.”

“I felt embarrassed,” Hetfield told the New York Post. “I haven’t been that angry in a long time. When something out of my control goes wrong, I still get wound up. I’m sure it taps into other stuff from my past, but I felt helpless.”

TMZ would report that the unfortunate screw-up was down to a stagehand accidentally unplugging a wire under the stage moments before the performance took place. A brutal mistake, but a mistake nonetheless – and one that Metallica, to their credit, were quickly able to put a positive spin on.

“Like they say, the show must go on,” said Lars on The Late Late Show. “We fought through it and a lot of people said that it at least made for great television.” “It ended up being a blessing because I ended up singing in a microphone with Lady Gaga – maybe even more than she wanted,” Hetfield told the New York Post. “It felt more like a real collaboration because of that.”

In hindsight, Metallica’s collab with Gaga is far from the biggest disaster the Four Horsemen have put their name to. A victory snatched from the jaws of defeat, it served as an imperfect if riotously entertaining awards performance unlike any other. Like just about everything else Metallica do, it was certainly unforgettable – and at least we have the flawless rehearsal footage to remind exactly how it all should have gone.

Megadeth‘s 1990 album Rust in Peace is one of the best thrash albums ever made, but it was recorded in absolutely chaotic circumstances.

Dave Mustaine had fired most of his band in 1988: guitarist Jeff Young and drummer Chuck Behler were out. After auditioning many musicians, former Cacophony guitarist Marty Friedman joined the band while Behler’s tech Nick Menza took over on drums.

“By just about every conceivable standard, Rust in Peace was a watershed event for Megadeth,” Mustaine recalled in his 2010 autobiography Mustaine: A Heavy Metal Memoir. “Funny thing was, it didn’t start out that well. We recorded at a place called Rumbo Recorders, which was owned by the Captain and Tennille, of all people. I was skeptical about Rumbo offering the right atmosphere, a feeling that was exacerbated one day when I walked in and saw our producer, Dave Jerden, eating a chili dog and smoking a cigarette at the controls. The place just reeked.”

According to engineer Micajah Ryan, the Megadeth frontman was swift in relieving Jerden of his post after a few days: “The quote was, ‘I think there’s too many guys named Dave around here, we’re gonna get rid of one of them.’ And Dave Jerden got fired.”

Producer Mike Clink also “got off on the wrong foot” with Mustaine when he revealed that he may have to leave the studio at a moment’s notice to work with Guns N’ Roses on their follow-up to Appetite for Destruction. It was another dog – this time an actual puppy – that ended this particular producer’s tenure.

“The damn dog ate a hole in the wall and then knocked over my guitar, and we just had to let him go,” remembered Mustaine. “But I want to be fair here. Mike Clink has always gotten credit for producing Rust in Peace, and I certainly wouldn’t deny his contributions. It’s a terrific record, start to finish.”

He’s not wrong. Rust in Peace is packed with highlights and spawned two Top 30 hit singles. The first was Holy Wars… The Punishment Due, inspired by the frontman’s unwise comments about the IRA during their show at the Antrim Forum in Northern Ireland.

The second single was political, too, but this time tapped into a popular UFO conspiracy theory that the US government allegedly hid alien lifeforms in an Ohio building belonging to the USAF.

“It was an idea that Nick came up with,” said Mustaine. “The idea’s based on a place in the Four Corners state region of the United States; it’s a place where the military intelligence is housing alien aircraft and alien life-forms. Not that I subscribe to this point of view or any of that kind of BS, but Nick is way into it. I mean, the guy thinks that Jesus was a Martian.

“But, I guess those of you who know Nick probably know that the possibility, the way he explains it, it could be real,” he conceded. “So we tried to bring it to you guys in a song form, and it’s up to your imaginations to see whether or not you believe it.”

Mustaine – a Christian – later told Rock Radio that Menza’s religious comments marked his card for a future dismissal.

“Menza is the guy who believes in UFOs,” he explained. “If you look at his website or if you listen to his solo music, it shows you where he’s at in his life. Nick said something that I found really juvenile and offensive. He told me that Jesus was an alien and he could levitate. That was the end of me taking Nick seriously – I believed in God ever since I was a kid.”

Mustaine had the song’s riff lying around unused for around a decade or so, back when he was lead guitarist for his first band, Panic.

“It was called N2RHQ and it was about an environment that was up on another planet,” he told Rolling Stone. “As it morphed through going into Metallica and us deciding whether we were gonna do that song, I just waited to revisit it in Megadeth, just like in Panic, I had the song Rust in Peace … Polaris completely done; it was called Child Saint back at that time. And I’m sure that if I would’ve shown it to the guys, Metallica probably would’ve recorded that one also.”

Hangar 18 is one of the album’s most ambitious songs. Tempo-wise, it’s all over the shop and changes four times before Mustaine opens his mouth and the climax of the song quickens the pace further.

“In the middle of the break when we go to the first extended solo section, it’s a very Spanish ‘jazzy’ kind of part,” Mustaine told Total Guitar. “Then the end solo, when the guitar duel takes over, it’s no holds barred get the fuck out of the way.”

Indeed, Friedman and Mustaine trade a staggering 11 solos during the song. In a post on his website, Friedman recalls that it was producer Clink that offered words of inspiration before committing his part to tape.

“He said: ‘Check out the lyrics of this song. It’s about aliens and Martians, so play something that sounds like you are coming from outer space.’

“That was good advice and from then on, I really paid a lot more attention to the lyrics in a song than I had before,” he added.

Hangar 18 was released as a single in February 1991 and was nominated in the ‘Best Metal Performance’ category at the Grammys held at Radio City Music Hall in New York City the following year.

During the ceremony, singer Johnny Mathis gave the band a shout-out during a pre-written bit with Dionne Warwick: “I just love the GRAMMYs. On what other list would I find my name between Madonna and Megadeth?”

Another band, whose name begins with M, were named as winners of their category for their self-titled album: Metallica. As the band accepted their gong, residents in Brooklyn could have probably heard Mustaine loudly complaining about this snub on his efforts despite writing a thrash classic for the ages.

It wasn’t meant to be Freddie Mercury‘s final performance, and it certainly wasn’t billed as such, but Queen’s 1986 show at Knebworth has gone down in history as just that. The last time Freddie Mercury took to the stage with his band.

There’s a shortage of video documenting what took place, but that’s far from unusual, even considering the historical nature of the show. Two months earlier Marillion had headlined the vast Garden Party, 35 miles north of Knebworth at the Milton Keynes bowl, and no professional footage of the show exists. “There was a disagreement over who was going to pay for it,” then-frontman Fish told this writer, “and at the end of the day nobody bothered filming it. It’s ridiculous.”

These days, of course, it’d be different. There’d be multiple cameras, a drone or two, pro-shot and fan-shot highlights would be on YouTube within hours, and the whole shebang would be released as a deluxe edition Blu-ray before the arrival of Autumn.

That’s not to say that there weren’t film crews at Knebworth. Anglia TV were there and filmed a segment for local news broadcast. Some documentary footage was shot by Rudi Dolezal and Hannes Rossacher, the Austrian duo responsible for Queen‘s One Vision video. And the entire set was relayed live to the huge screens that book-ended the stage.

Various pieces of footage have surfaced over the years. Anglia shared some film shot at the show to accompany a story about Brian May receiving an honorary degree from the University of Hertfordshire in 2002, but the footage has become a subject of some controversy – even conspiracy – among Queen fans.

“It is one of the biggest blunders in our history,” May once said. “The cameras were rolling, and visuals of the entire concert were relayed to the Eidophor screens simultaneously with the show. All it needed was for someone in our team to put a tape machine on the end of either the screen mix or the cameras themselves. No-one did. So it all went into the ether.

“There is a little bit of documentary footage in existence, also shot at the time separately, by Rudi and Hannes, I think, which includes some beautiful audience footage – which has been used in the odd documentary. But that’s it. It would have been a great DVD to have, wouldn’t it. Queen’s Last Concert! Well, sadly, it will never happen.”

So we’re left with scraps, until we’re told otherwise. But there’s still magic in those morsels, as proved by the short segment of video that shows a giddy Freddie Mercury performing vocal exercises in a backstage dressing room immediately prior to the band’s stage walk. He’s even joined by Roger Taylor for a quick run through the “deeeeey-o” call-and-response Mercury had made world famous at Queen’s Live Aid show the previous summer.

It’s a wonderful clip. Mercury looks as if he doesn’t have a care in the world. Yet he’d already told his bandmates that he was nearing the end of the road, “I’m not going to be doing this forever,” he’s reported to have said. “This is probably the last time.”

Sadly, he was right.

Effectively written out of history by the immediately subsequent media-friendly circus that was Britpop, Carter The Unstoppable Sex Machine were significantly more successful in the early 90s than almost anybody seems, or possibly cares, to remember. From humble indie roots, the shorts and cycling cap-sporting duo enjoyed a five-year overnight success that took them from tireless toilet-circuit slogging to the top of the UK album chart.

Dangle-fringed beanpole Jim Morrison (yes, really) (aka Jim Bob) first met cheeky-chopped Angus Young aficionado Les ‘Fruitbat’ Carter in a Streatham rehearsal studio, and before you could say ‘Sarf London indie-squindy apprenticeship’ they’d manned the boiler room of Jamie Wednesday. When they were the only two band members to turn up for an ’87 London Astoria charity gig, inspired by the Beastie Boys, Public Enemy and Age Of Chance the pair got up to play the show as Carter USM with a tape recorder rhythm section.

So far, so Squatney. But where countless other 80s landfill indies foundered, Carter – with a deft combination of post-punk Clash-like political conscience, a well-tuned ear for rabble-rousing terrace chants, heartstring-strumming, tears-in-beers anthems and memorable lyrics laced with Olympics-standard puns Jim Bob delivered like a tabloid sub editor with a penchant for the London A-Z – saw word-of-mouth peer reviews take them from the Bull & Gate to Brixton Academy in record time.

Carter had never quite got over punk. The Clash were a touchstone for both, while Jim Bob found endless pith and vinegar in the lyrical blurts of Elvis Costello and Jam-era Paul Weller. “We were quite politically minded, lefty people at the time,” says Jim Bob, “We didn’t know much about it, and were very non-political party.”

“In our twenties, almost thirties,” Les remembers, “we still had that kind of teenage anger about… everything, really, but especially injustice.”

Carter hit a nerve, jagged a constituency who hadn’t followed a band since Chairman Joe sacked Mick Jones. They found this audience with a winning combo of big tunes, tangible passion and a rare ability to sell serious issues with a sharp ready wit. They simultaneously inhabited rock’s cutting edge, with their hip-hop-alike embrace of technology and sampling, while offering a mighty dose of punk nostalgia nobody in their audience had previously realised they even had.

While fiercely decrying societal wrongs across a series of alternative chartbusters – Sheriff Fatman (slum landlords), Rubbish (anodyne playlist radio), Anytime Anyplace Anywhere (alcoholism), Bloodsport For All (racist bullying in the armed forces) – they sold an awful lot of T-shirts.

Having gone top 30 with their 101 Damnations debut album and Top 10 with their 30 Something second (both released on independents and recorded in their mate’s shed), they decided to make their major label debut with After The Watershed (Early Learning The Hard Way), a single about child abuse, with an audacious ‘Goodbye Ruby Tuesday’ hook-line that almost dared the Rolling Stones to sue them inside out.

“That happened during our honeymoon period with Chrysalis,” recalls Jim Bob. “So I don’t think After The Watershed’s subject matter was ever an issue. I mean, everything that happened after was an issue, and how we promoted it was an issue, but I don’t think they ever had a problem with it up front. The press did, though. They thought it was too jolly musically, too danceable, and should you really be dancing or enjoying yourself to a song about child abuse?”

Was there a specific incident that inspired the lyric?

“I’ve a very vivid memory of seeing someone hitting their child,” says Jim Bob, “and feeling I needed to intervene, because I was thinking what happens when they’re not out shopping? What happens when they’re at home? That’s what set me off lyrically. The Ruby Tuesday thing? I was just singing it along to Les’s music, and it just sort of came out. It’s my favourite Rolling Stones song, the meaning made sense and, naively, I thought: ‘Oh, they’ll love this.’”

“When we were at Big Cat and Rough Trade we never sought permission for any of the samples we used, but Chrysalis thought that they legally had to ask. It took time for the Stones’ publishers to respond, and we’d already released it by then.” The Stones won, the record was withdrawn, the song was cut from the album, and both Jagger and Richards gained a credit.

Would that that were the end of the song’s attendant controversy. In October ’91, Carter appeared on The Smash Hits Poll Winners Party (televised live on BBC1) to promote After The Watershed. Les – fresh from the road – had enjoyed a couple of cold drinks, and at the song’s conclusion enthusiastically hoofed his equipment. As one would.

The show’s presenter, one Phillip Schofield (then still very much ticking the box marked ‘much-loved national treasure’), offered something of a sneer in response to this gesture, which elicited a headline-grabbing rugby tackle from an infuriated Fruitbat by way of reply.

Carter followed 1992: The Love Album with a further brace of Top 10s (Post Historic Monsters, Worry Bomb), before gradually expanding to a quintet and then going their separate ways in 1998: Fruitbat into Abdoujaparov, Jim Bob into Jim’s Superstereo World, authoring novels, and pursuing a solo career that last year saw the release of Automatic and Stick.

So how’s the old Sex Machine, then? Still unstoppable?

“I’m definitely stoppable,” admits Les. “I might have even stopped.”

The remastered edition of Carter USM’s Straw Donkey: The Complete Singles is out now via Chrysalis.