Metallica Zurich 2019: When Papa Het preaches, the police stand in line

On Friday, May 10th, Metallica played at Zurich's Letzigrund Stadium as part of their "WorldWired" tour. The band gets up to 6 million dollars in the box office every evening, no wonder the ticket prices were steep, even by Swiss standards. And so many came Concert touriststo snap selfies with your smartphone and post them on all social networks. So that these hipsters could feel comfortable, a huge armada of police and security guards would be deployed to steer the crowds on arrival, in the stadium and on departure. Metallica: Masters of Puppets ?!

Friends, don't get me wrong, the concert was good - but nothing more then. It was no longer an experience as it was before five years ago in St. Jakob in Basel. Proper habit wearers were scarce on Friday - and yet the Americans organized the evening in a ruthless manner, so that one or the other cuddly skirt fan was put to flight. It rumbled violently in the Letzigrund Stadium, which was not entirely sold out. But unfortunately - at least at first - the staccato could hardly be understood rhythmically due to the unfavorable acoustic disposition of the place. The rowdy, high-speed beat is smothered by its own echo right at the start with «Hardwired», which was catapulted back into the round from the south curve. Lars Ulrich's (55) drums extinguished themselves in the frenzy of speed, James Hetfield's (55) voice was barely audible and Robert Trujillo's (54) bass played the xylophone with the audience's ribs. Unfortunately, Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett (57) was completely lost in all the booming mush – luckily there were sound engineers at work who were able to unravel the individual components again.

The WorldWired Tour has been running since February 2016, bringing in up to 6 million dollars per evening. Well over 100 concerts of the total of 165 have already been played, and we are now in the last third of the concert series ending in November. Everyone can now calculate for themselves how much the tour of the American heavy metal giants brings in. You might think that a good amount of routine, exhaustion and prosperity has crept into the band structure - and that's where the dog lies buried. James Hetfield and his men are happy to show off their renewed lust for the brittle, to stretch a thrashy song like "Master of Puppets" into a tricky twelve-minute track or to make the sky cry with the monumentally shattering "Creeping Death". . But not only does the sky feel like crying, the fans of the first hours aren't offered the usual music spectacle either - but a huge, almost perfectly staged show, with buten lasers, videos rushing across the gigantic screen and some pyrotechnics, to please the concert tourists and the "Metallica family" that has meanwhile arrived in the mainstream - the music becomes a minor matter.

Metallica - Disposable Heroes [Live] - October 5.10.2019th, XNUMX - Letzigrund Stadium - Zurich, Switzerland

The show does an excellent job of ignoring the many small breaks that take place after almost every track and the band either walked off the stage completely or Papa Het preached to his Metallica family. Papa Het used to love to refer to his fans as "Family", but always with a subtle sarcastic undertone and a nasty smile. This Friday Papa Het stood on the edge of the huge stage and spoke to his "Family" like the pastor from the pulpit. «It's a beautiful day and we're here to play music (...) I see you smiling. That's nice and makes me smile too." He inquires about the physical well-being of the isolated pogo-dancing audience and he no longer addresses his audience with "motherfuckers" as he used to, but only with "family". A small interlude in the style of "Nightwish" also fits in to bridge one of the numerous breaks. Not that bad, the gentlemen played a whopping 140 minutes and, in addition to slower pieces, also real hits like "Seek & Destroy", "Master Of Puppets" and "For Whom the Bell Tolls", which should also convince the old-school metalheads .

Metallica used to be known for playing their fast, groovy and gruff thrash hits live a little faster than on record. With classics like «Whiplash», «Jump in the Fire», «No Remorse», «Battery» or «Fight Fire with Fire», the gentlemen from San Francisco used to set the stage on fire and every metal head in front of them let the headbanging cracking neck. Also on Friday evening the Bay Area thrashers made an effort to create a rush of speed among the audience. They also leaf through those registers of their song catalogue, which were created in the years when they weren't really into thoughtfulness and harmony. And so is the stadium togetherness that Metallica evokes here, a unity in the thunderstorm, a soundtrack in the hymn of the decomposing. That part of the audience who only appreciates Metallica from the releases of that time or even from relevant cuddly rock compilations looks puzzled in the Letzigrund. Exactly the same as the old school metal heads when they notice how cool classics sound slower instead of faster than on the studio recordings and Lars keeps losing the beat. The outstanding click of Ulrich's bass drums, which echoed back from the stadium roof, was especially in the slowed down faster pieces, partly completely wrong and made some of the few habit wearers falter with their head shaking. Well, Lars is not Mikkey Dee (55), who just a few years ago beat Motörhead through the show with flying colors and was always announced by Lemmy at concerts as "The best drummer in the world".

The "Sad But True" is followed by a piece of "local folklore" as announced by bassist Robert Trujillo. With "The Usurper", accompanied only by Kirk Hammett, there is a sympathetic homage to Zurich thrash metal pioneers "Celtic Frost" - which leaves most of the audience slightly perplexed. In the 38 years Metallica always created sharp contrasts, so the music of this band was married, tortured, cuddled, rebelled or buried. It can therefore confidently be described as multifunctional, even if the spectrum of action in Letzigrund is somewhat smaller. Here you can alternately nodding your head, raising your fist in the air, fainting, dancing the pogo or being amazed - and a few even flee. The fact that middle management, metal headbangers and Swisscom secretaries freak out next to each other to a song like “Seek and Destroy” is as great as it is amazing. The band played their very first concert in Europe in February 1984, at the Zurich Volkshaus, as the opening act for the British group Venom. But more important than old stories, which at most a very small part of the Letzigrund audience had experienced themselves, were the encores for most of them. You don't let Metallica off the stage without hearing "Nothing Else Matters" and "Enter Sandman" - the two biggest hits from the "Black Album" that made the musicians superstars.

Metallica - The Usurper [Live] - 5.10.209/XNUMX/XNUMX - Letzigrund Stadium - Zurich, Switzerland

What was particularly astonishing that evening was the number of security forces who guided the crowds on arrival, during the event and especially on departure. If you came by car, you could expect massive traffic jams and many hours on the streets, with a massive police presence. But even visitors who arrived by public transport were already greeted at the station by masses of yellow vests - and we don't mean the demonstrators known from France - and if you took the tram or bus, you could at least see Letzigrund at every station there are four security guards who take care of the visitors. The whole thing had the touch of a large demo that the police really wanted to have under control. Around the stadium, the streets were blocked off and entry into the stadium was only possible through several locks, where people were isolated and checked, and then, after the usual sausage and beer stands, they were smuggled back into the stadium by yellow vests become. After the concert, the whole thing then ran backwards to get out of the football temple, but the roads that were still closed were no longer served directly by public transport, but you were allowed to walk under the eyes of a lot of police and security to Albisriederplatz to be loaded onto the trams just before the station by a trellis of cops and security who stood next to each other every 2-3 meters. When you arrived at the train station, you finally felt like you were on the runway of an airport, because the yellow vests guide the concert-goers in the right direction with signal lights. No question, everything is well organized, the security guards (mostly) friendly, but I have never seen such a large number of security guards in my more than thirty years of going to a concert. Sometimes there was almost the feeling of being at a big demo and not going to a concert, and the whole thing raises the question of who pays for all this "security" effort? That would at least explain the high ticket prices... *cough*

setlist

1. The Ecstasy of Gold (Ennio Morricone Song)
2. Hardwired intro
3. Hardwired
4. The Memory Remains (with extended outro)
5. Disposable Heroes
6. The Thing That Shouldn't Be
7. The Unforgiven
8. Now That We're Dead
9. Moth Into Flame
10. Sad but true
11. No leaf clover
12. Kirk Hammett and Robert Trujilo's solos of Celtic Frost's "The Usurper", "ManUNkind" and "Orion"
13. Frantic
14. One
15. Master of puppets
16. For Whom the Bell Tolls
17. Creeping death
18. Seek & Destroy

Encore:

19. Lords of Summer
20. Nothing Else Matters
21. Enter Sandman (with “The Frayed Ends of Sanity” outro)

Metallica - Creeping Death [Live] - October 5.10.2019th, XNUMX - Letzigrund Stadium - Zurich, Switzerland

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Metallica: Thank you Zurich!