For the greater part of my life, I’ve always dreamed of being able to see Metallica perform/play live. While they’ve been around to the places I’ve lived throughout The States, unfortunately, the timing never worked out in my favor. Once I found out Glasse would be covering Metallica’s show in Copenhagen, Denmark, it seemed like the timing had finally lined up perfectly.
For those who might not know, Lars Ulrich (Metallica’s drummer) was born and raised in Denmark. Having moved to The States in his teenage years, he returned to Copenhagen years later with his bandmates. They spent a good amount of time recording and growing in the Danish capitol, and produced their second studio album Ride the Lightning — which earned them a spot on the Billboard Top 100 at the time. The band’s history with the city made me that much more excited to finally see them live.
Arriving to the venue, I was overjoyed to see that the fans weren’t just getting ready for the show — but there had nearly been a small Metallica festival set up surrounding Telia Parken Arena. A variety of vendors had set up small restaurants and bars, providing quite the party to have everyone ready to head into the stadium. Another beautiful characteristic of this “Metallica festival” was that you could see fans of all ages partying together, ready to enjoy the show.
Opening up the evening featured performances by the thrashing Bokassa and GHOST. Although the performances were exciting — it wasn’t hard to notice the crowd was incredibly eager to see Metallica storm the stage.
[ngg src=”galleries” ids=”1″ display=”basic_imagebrowser”]Normally, this is the part of the concert review where I’d say something along the lines of “then the lights cut out, and the music begun” — but the sun is up past 10pm in Denmark; Metallica emerged on stage in broad daylight and booming heavy distortion began.
As I previously mentioned, Metallica has a special connection with Copenhagen. Entering the show, I was hoping to hear a lot of their earlier music. I figured the performance would be quite unique due to the homecoming essence of the evening. To my surprise, my wish was granted, and the set list was absolutely fantastic featuring old and new tracks such as Master of Puppets, One, Ride the Lightning, Hardwired, Moth Into Flame, and many, many more.
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One of the most unique aspects of the performance was when they stopped the show to pay tribute to Copenhagen’s music scene. Apparently, on tour, Metallica stops each show to cover a song by a local artist from the location they are performing in for the night. To the audience‘s satisfaction, Metallica chose to cover a song by the beloved Danish band, D.A.D. The crowd went wild, cheering and chanting in awe with the treasured band.
Even though the entire performance was decorated by impressive pyrotechnics (including a ball of fire that travelled around the stage — I’ll always be fascinated with how people are able to control fire), Metallica shocked the crowd with the finale, consisting of performances of Nothing Else Matters and Enter Sandman, with towers throughout the audience which shot up huge blasts of fire. This made it a show which was hard to leave, as everyone wanted more.
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