Metallica played Iron Maiden classic Prowler during the Black Album tour, and it’s the best cover they never recorded

Matt Mills
·2 min read
7
Footage of Metallica performing live in 1992 and a photo of Iron Maiden's debut album.
Footage of Metallica performing live in 1992 and a photo of Iron Maiden's debut album.

Metallica love a good cover. The biggest band in heavy metal history have recorded a grand total of 40 in their four-decade-plus career, and that doesn’t even include the many others they’ve performed as live one-offs over the years. Redos like Whiskey In The Jar and Turn The Page are now just as associated with the Four Horsemen as their original artists – however, one of the band’s best-ever reinterpretations has criminally become lost to time.

At one San Francisco stop during the Black Album tour in 1992, Metallica preceded a performance of Master Of Puppets with a quick jam of Iron Maiden’s Prowler (footage of which is embedded below). The song, which opened Maiden’s 1980 self-titled album and featured ex-vocalist Paul Di’Anno, is a seedy metal number that introduced many to the band’s punky yet progressive ways. Then, in the hands of James Hetfield and the boys, it became a gravelly thrasher that sounded even more aggressive and sordid.

Papa Het’s raspy vocals make Di’Anno’s lecherous lyrics – “See the ladies flashing all their legs and lashes, I’ve just got to find my way!” – sound even more threatening. Meanwhile, the sharp lead guitar line is perfectly tackled by Kirk Hammett and his wah-wah pedal, as Jason Newsted and Lars Ulrich give the old-school stomper a fresh speed metal verve.

Metallica never played Prowler live again as far as we know (there’s no reference to it anywhere on setlist database setlist.fm), and they certainly didn’t record a version of it either. Considering the band’s penchant for putting their snarling metal stamp on other artists’ material, it’s a crying shame. It certainly had all the intensity and catchiness to become the next Am I Evil? given the chance.

Currently, Maiden don’t even perform Prowler live. The last time they did, according to setlist.fm, was in 2005, during a tour where the band exclusively played material from their first four albums: Iron Maiden, Killers, The Number Of The Beast and Piece Of Mind. It begs the question, why does nobody want to do anything with this absolute banger of a song?!