Are you sitting down? Are your copies of Master of Puppets and Transformer in a safe place? Good! Metallica and Lou Reed have revealed an interest in performing their upcoming collaborative album live, meaning audiences will soon get the chance to find out whether pretentious beat poetry over tepid metal riffs translates better in person.
“We would love to do some shows,” Metallica frontman James Hetfield told an Argentinian radio station, as quoted by Blabbermouth. “I don’t know how many, I don’t know where. How many can we do together? It doesn’t need to be 20 shows and it doesn’t need to be one show — somewhere in the middle there, I think, to give everyone a taste of it and just see what it’s like.”
Hetfield looked to reassure fans about Lulu, after preview track “The View” got an, ahem, mixed critical reception. “I’m sure there’s some Metallica fans that will think that ‘This is the new Metallica record. I don’t like it. I’m scared.’ And it’s not. This is a project that was presented to us that we wanted to challenge ourselves with.”
Hetfield, drummer Lars Ulrich, and the former Velvet Underground frontman himself also recently sat down with Franco-German TV network Arte to talk about the album, which arrives November 1. The best part goes something like this:
Ulrich: (struggling to get a word in edgewise): “Lou asked me, ‘Are you up for a dare? Are you feeling adventurous?'”
Reed: (utterly deadpan): “Well, it was more like, ‘Do you want to end your career?”
(laughter)
Hetfield: (jocularly) “Every album!”
Watch four short clips from the interview below:
