Lars Ulrich always wanted Oasis to cover a Metallica song: “That would be pretty funny”
In the Metallica world, Lars Ulrich never saw cover tunes as taking the easy way out.
Some of their greatest shows started out being a bunch of friends getting together to watch them play a bunch of other people’s songs, and while they did eventually graduate to making the best hard rock ever made, it’s not like they were going to take ‘Am I Evil’ out of the setlist when it managed to get the crowd going. But even if Ulrich liked the idea of working on other people’s material, he was never that snobby about other people trying to put their own spin on any of Metallica’s classics as well.
Because if you look through Metallica’s entire discography, it’s not like they weren’t used to pinching a few riffs here and there. The middle section of ‘Master of Puppets’ already has a riff that was taken directly out of David Bowie’s ‘Andy Warhol’, and even though they are more than capable of writing their own classics, they were clearly inspired by more than a few people when looking at the cascading guitar figure that kicks off ‘Welcome Home (Santiarium)’.
But for a band that was so ingrained in metal music, Ulrich was always the one trying to branch out into other areas. He felt that there were bound to be a few more bits of magic outside of the Black Sabbaths of the world, and when looking at their experiences working on records like Load, it’s not like he and Kirk Hammett were ever afraid of bringing in influences from the non-metal world.
Ulrich was the first to claim that he was a massive fan of U2, but when Oasis first came out, he was head over heels before they had even made it in the US. ‘Wonderwall’ was what really sealed the deal for the Manchester legends when they started gaining traction on the other side of the Atlantic, but Ulrich saw a band that was clearly in their element from the first moment he heard them playing ‘Supersonic’.
While Noel Gallagher has said on more than a few occasions that he wasn’t exactly a fan of heavy metal music, he did at least see the merit in a band like Metallica. ‘The Chief’ even bragged that Ulrich was the first person he signed an autograph for in America, and when the metal titans were starting to have some fun with Garage Inc, Ulrich always held out hope that Noel would return the favour and maybe play a Metallica tune live.
After all, the band could get heavy when they wanted to, and Ulrich felt that he needed to hear Liam or Noel sing a tune like ‘Nothing Else Matters’, saying, “I think I’d love to hear like… The first time I ever met Noel Gallagher, he told me that he thought ‘Nothing Else Matters’ was one of the best songs ever written. I was like ‘Wow!’. So I’d like to hear Noel and Liam with one acoustic guitar doing ‘Nothing Else Matters’. That would be pretty funny.”
That would have certainly been interesting considering the band’s history of working on songs like ‘Headshrinker’ and ‘Bring It On Down’, but given how Metallica paid tribute to Oasis the first time, it’s not like they exactly nailed it. Their version of ‘Wonderwall’ was clearly a piss-take, but even if Noel could do a halfway convincing rendition of the power ballad, it makes a lot more sense for them to throw something like ‘Shakermaker’ into the set instead.
But the fact that Ulrich was so excited about the idea of Oasis covering one of their songs really shows you the kind of listener he was. He was always looking for something different, and while no one would have expected the same band that made ‘Live Forever’ to start writing metal songs, the drummer was already starting to think about what happens when bands step out of their comfort zones.
