Credit: Alberto Cabello
October 25th, 2026 · 6:00am GMT
They might occasionally receive some flak for not always being the tightest live act on the planet, but there’s no denying that Metallica have always known how to put on a spectacle with their live shows.
The more negative facets of their live shows have perhaps become more evident in later years, with internal friction between members causing the band to find themselves unable to co-operate with one another as instinctively as they used to. However, with so much of their performance being this high-octane extravaganza of rock and roll excess, complete with strobes, pyrotechnics and a monstrous sound, you can’t really fault the band for not putting in the effort to make it a bounty for the senses.
Granted, there’s also the band’s propensity for not knowing when to keep their mouths shut, which has proven to be an obstacle that has both caused disharmony within the ranks of the band and within their fanbase, but those who flock to see them still can’t deny that what they’re witnessing is a stage production that is determined to overwhelm.
Ever since the dawn of rock and roll, there have been performers who have gone the extra mile to ensure that their live performances are electrifying in every sense of the word. You only have to take a look at how remarkably different the likes of Elvis Presley were to anything that had come before, and how far James Brown was willing to take things with his marathon performances, to recognise that there have always been acts who are capable of making their live performances extreme yet memorable for the right reasons.
However, given how Metallica have always operated in the realm of heavy metal, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that it’s a classic rock outfit that evidently provided the band with their biggest inspiration for putting together an outrageous live show, with Lars Ulrich having had his mind blown as a teenager when he first laid eyes upon Deep Purple.
Speaking to Classic Rock in 2012, the drummer claimed that the British rock titans were unlike anything else he had ever seen when he witnessed them at the KB Hallen in Copenhagen aged just 13. “I remember Ritchie Blackmore throwing his guitar up into the lighting rig, rubbing it against the speaker cabinets and playing it with his ass,” he recalled, revelling with glee at the fond memories of seeing the band in 1973.
This level of extravagance was clearly something that lit up a passion for performance in Ulrich, with him remembering every aspect of what the band were doing in vivid detail almost 40 years on.
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“Jon Lord was waving the beast around, Ian Gillan was hidden behind a curtain of hair playing the bongos, Roger Glover was holding the beat down, while Ian Paice was sitting back there with his specs on doing his thing,” he continued.
“I had never seen anything like it before. I was completely and utterly blown away. As you can imagine, it was the loudest, coolest thing I’d ever seen.”
It’s so obvious that this sort of thing would have appealed to Ulrich, and undoubtedly the other members of Metallica too, so it’s no surprise that they’ve always strived to go one better than their predecessors and tried to create something of such great magnitude for their live performances.
