Anything but The Quietus life as web site dares to write about Metallica
Words Niall O’Keeffe
The interweb’s existence continues to dog Metallica. Eight years on from their frenzied pursuit of Napster through the US courts, the rock dinosaurs again found themselves eggy of face recently, after their management company got heavy on music site The Quietus. Contention arose after a journalist who’d been invited to a playback of a rough version of the new Metallica album had the temerity to review it. Bloody journalists, eh? Always with the writing.
After The Quietus posted the (generous) review, Metallica’s management Q Prime issued a forceful demand that it be removed. When that failed, the slavering 10-percenters began an aggressive campaign to identify the journalist who’d penned the piece, at which point said hack asked, regretfully, that the piece be taken down. The Quietus complied.
By now, though, word of the dust-up was out, and Metallica again became the blogosphere’s punchbags of choice. On June 11, a post appeared on their official site: “Once we re-surfaced on Tuesday after a few weeks on tour in Europe, we were informed that someone at Q Prime had made the error of asking a few publications to take down reviews… After a few rounds of managerial ear spank and sentencing everyone at Q Prime to 20 push-ups each, we figured why not take matters into our own hands and just post the links here on our site.”
Quietus editor (and Pigeon contributor) John Doran responded: “Because of their [Metallica’s] magnanimous behaviour we’d like to apologise for suggesting that they were insane and for claiming that they hadn’t done a good album since the tragic death of Cliff Burton… We’d cautiously like to say thanks to Metallica for seeing sense. We’d also hope that James doesn’t ‘accidentally’ mistake Q Prime for an ursine invasion and take his mighty bear-cannon to them.”
Doran has since taken a “conciliatory” phone call from Q Prime supremo Cliff Burnstein.
