DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER

In the early days of 1982, a letter postmarked ‘California’ arrived at the three-bedroom semi in Stourbridge in the West Midlands where Brian Tatler lived with his parents. Tatler, aged 21, was the guitarist in Diamond Head, rising stars of the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal, who had cockily proclaimed themselves “the natural successors to Zeppelin”. The letter was from Tatler’s pen pal, an 18-year-old called Lars Ulrich, an aspiring drummer and NWOBHM obsessive, who with his family had recently moved from Denmark to Newport Beach, California.

A friendship between the two had developed after Ulrich visited the UK in the summer of ’81, where he watched Diamond Head play at the Woolwich Odeon in London, and wangled his way backstage to meet the band. Ulrich ended up sleeping on Tatler’s bedroom floor for a week, and together they went to see another of Ulrich’s favourite bands, Motörhead, at the Heavy Metal Holocaust festival at Port Vale football ground in Stoke-onTrent.

Later, in a letter, scrawled in biro and with excitable over-use of punctuation, Ulrich thanked Tatler for looking after him. “I would have been kinda lost without you guys,” he wrote. He asked if Diamond Head were any closer to signing a major record deal. He also had news to share about