Aural Amphetamine: Metallica and the Dawn of Thrash / 2008

While Heavy Metal is often accused of being static and conservative, in truth it is a radical form that regularly re-invents itself, and one which attracts generation after generation of musicians willing to learn from the past, but hungry to evolve the future. And so it was that, in the early 1980s, a young man named Lars Ulrich was so taken by the New Wave of British Heavy Metal, then creating music paper headlines in the UK, that he came to England to track down obscure records, take them home to LA and, with his buddies, listen to them - until they came up with a genre of their own, soon be termed Thrash Metal.