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generations. All the artists and that whole scene. And it seemed like I was just a product of a scene.
    ‘I think part of the strength, part of the real positive thing of my early years, was that there was a lot of freedom to experience a lot of things on my own, to seek a lot of answers on my own, to not have anything handed to me, to not have particular ways of thinking, ideologies or whatever, forced upon me. I did a lot of soul-searching. I did a lot of sniffing around, I did a lot of kind of checking into things. Checking into things myself with a kind of a juvenile curiosity.’
    In the dog days of the summer of 1969 that curiosity led Lars Ulrich into one of London’s most exclusive quarters for a gathering which would secure him bragging rights for years to come.While his father practised his ground strokes in SW19, young Lars’s interest was piqued by a photograph of a group of louche, long-haired young men in a national newspaper; his mother informed him that the gentlemen in question were a rock ’n’ roll band who that same week would be staging a free concert in one of London’s royal parks. Lars demanded that he be taken along. And so on July 5, 1969, mother and son joined Torben, his South African colleague Ray Moore and approximately 500,000 other music fans in London’s Hyde Park for the first live Rolling Stones concert in over two years. On a balmy summer evening, England’s most celebrated rock ’n’ roll collective turned in a historic performance which sealed their reputation as one of the form’s most supple and dexterous live turns.
    It would, however, be another English rock band that Lars Ulrich would ultimately credit with setting his life in the direction it would follow to the present day. On February 10, 1973, Deep Purple closed out the first leg of their
Who Do We Think We Are
European tour with a date at the K.B. Hallen in Copenhagen. In the stalls that evening, alongside his father and Moore, was the nine-year-old Lars.
    ‘There was a tennis tournament there – all tennis tournaments start on Monday so on the Sunday all the players were invited to see Deep Purple,’ Ulrich recalls. ‘So my father and a couple of the other guys went. It was pretty fucking cool. I was just infatuated, not just with the music but the event. The people, the volume, the reverberation, the light show, the whole thing. Ritchie Blackmore – I didn’t even know his name – I remember him rubbing his guitar on his ass. That was so cool. The next day I went into the local record store and the only Deep Purple record they had was
Fireball
so I started with that and didn’t look back.’
    In the aftermath of Deep Purple’s Copenhagen bow, Lars set his heart upon learning to play guitar, cajoling his cousin Stein into parting with his own electric guitar in exchange foran album by Danish singer/songwriter John Mogensen. Six months of lessons with the music teachers at Maglegårdsskolen ensued, but the boy had little aptitude for the instrument, and it was soon cast aside, with Lars finding greater entertainment in strumming a tennis racquet in front of his bedroom mirror. His commitment to this ‘instrument’ was nonetheless impressive: on one occasion he, Stein and a couple of local boys air-racqueted their way through both sides of Status Quo’s
Live!
album without a pause, replicating the intensity of Glasgow’s Apollo Theatre circa 1976 by turning the heating in his playroom on to full power so that they were dripping with sweat before the first of its twelve tracks reached its end. Such dedication was mirrored in the lengths the youngster would go to in order to see his favourite bands. In spring 1976 Kiss announced a show at Copenhagen’s Falkoner Theatre as part of their first ever European tour, news which thrilled Lars Ulrich until he realised that the date fell smack in the middle of a school trip to North Jutland, meaning that he would be almost 450 kilometres away when the Demon,