On March 23, METALLICA drummer Lars Ulrich took part in an interview at the Online Marketing Rockstars (OMR) festival — the most well-known trade fair for European online marketing and one of the biggest in the world — which was held in Hamburg, Germany.
Asked what METALLICA did differently from the other “Big Four” thrash metal bands of the 1980s (SLAYER, MEGADETH and ANTHRAX) that made the James Hetfield-fronted outfit so much more commercially successful, Ulrich said: “Well, I don’t wanna sell anybody down the river here. Obviously, all these bands are friends of ours, peers of ours, and I have a tremendous amount of respect and love for each one of those bands. But, I guess, we’ve always felt in METALLICA that we were autonomous and that we were in our own world and that we were misfits and that we never felt like we were part of a scene. So we really only ever charted our own course, as they say. We just are fiercely independent, and it’s an approach to everything that we do, which is that we don’t try to latch on to another way of doing things or piggybacking on particular trends or fashions or business styles or whatever. But we just do what is right for METALLICA in our own universe. And we’ve made, I guess, some decisions along the way, both creatively and practically, that have put us on a different course. So it’s not my place… I’m not a journalist, and it’s not my place to sit and talk about why we are in a particular place and other people are not. I feel uncomfortable with that.”