"No guitar solos! No belly dancing music!" Metallica's Kirk Hammett looks back on working with Lou Reed on their controversial, much-mocked and largely-misunderstood collaboration Lulu

(Image credit: Anton Corbijn)

When Lulu, Metallica's collaborative album with Lou Reed, emerged on Halloween, 2011, the reviews that followed were appropriately nightmarish. UK music website The Quietus considered the work, a double album based on the Lulu plays (Earth Spirit and Pandora’s Box) by German writer Frank Wedekind, "a candidate for one of the worst albums ever made", while Kerrang! slammed it as "a catastrophic failure on almost every level".

Classic Rock's Mick Wall, a long-time friend of the band, who penned their 2010 biography Enter Night, offered a more generous appraisal of the 10-song set, stating that while "traditionalist metal fans will be disappointed", the pairing of metal's biggest biggest band with the former Velvet Underground leader "makes for an absolutely shattering combination".

For their part, the members of Metallica regret nothing.

"Lulu wasn’t accepted as much as we accepted it," James Hetfield acknowledged in 2015, adding, "I’m really proud that we did it. It was fun, it was an adventure."

Speaking in 2023, drummer Lars Ulrich staunchly defended the album, saying it "sounds like a motherfucker", and adding, "I can only put the [negative] reaction down to ignorance."

And now, in a new interview with Rolling Stone, guitarist Kirk Hammett states, "That album means so much to me for a number of reasons."

"The lyrics are amazing," Hammett continues. "It’s poetry from track to track. I’m a huge Lou Reed fan. To be able to hang out with him and work with him musically meant so much."

Hammett also recalls that Reed had some very specific musical demands when he got together with the band at Metallica HQ in California in the spring of 2011.

“I remember I started doing some wah-wah stuff and he just went up to the mic and said, ‘No,'” Hammett recalls. “I was like, What? And he goes, ‘No guitar solos.’ I’m like, OK. And then I remember at one point I went to a Phrygian dominant, you know, it’s kind of Eastern sounding scale. And he went up to the mic and said, ‘No belly dancing music.'”

Hammett also recalls that, upon hearing the song Junior Dad for the first time, he and James Hetfield were reduced to tears.

"I can’t listen to it, man," he admitted. "Brings me to tears. I remember when Lou said, ‘I have a song for you and I want this to be on the album.’ And he played it for James and I. And by the end of the song, I looked at James, and James looked at me and we both had tears in our eyes. Then Lou Reed came in and saw us both crying in the kitchen. He’s smiling and he said, ‘I got you, didn’t I?'”

When the record emerged, Reed hailed it as "the best thing I ever did."

"We pushed as far as we possibly could within the realms of reality," he said, saluting Metallica as "the hardest power rock you could come up with."

"This is the best thing I ever did," he continued, "and I did it with the best group I could possibly find. By definition, everybody involved was honest. This has come into the world pure."

Lulu peaked on both the UK and US album charts at number 36. Three years after its release, the record had sold just under 33,000 copies in the United States, and its worldwide sales now are around the 300,000 mark.

Artists

A music writer since 1993, formerly Editor of Kerrang! and Planet Rock magazine (RIP), Paul Brannigan is a Contributing Editor to Louder. Having previously written books on Lemmy, Dave Grohl (the Sunday Times best-seller This Is A Call) and Metallica (Birth School Metallica Death, co-authored with Ian Winwood), his Eddie Van Halen biography (Eruption in the UK, Unchained in the US) emerged in 2021. He has written for Rolling Stone, Mojo and Q, hung out with Fugazi at Dischord House, flown on Ozzy Osbourne's private jet, played Angus Young's Gibson SG, and interviewed everyone from Aerosmith and Beastie Boys to Young Gods and ZZ Top. Born in the North of Ireland, Brannigan lives in North London and supports The Arsenal.