A unique stage and a bombardment of metal classics: Metallica live 

Sunday afternoon and Cardiff city centre feels like an alternate world where everyone is a metalhead. The 76,000 ticketholders, who comprise the largest audience ever for the Principality Stadium, are all in great spirits under the mellow post-heatwave sun. Womanby Street is gridlocked with Metallica shirts, and the staff of a popular city centre coffee shop explain to me how much friendlier today’s patrons are than Take That’s crowd the previous week. Nature is healing.

Inside the Principality (it’s tough not to call it the Millennium, but I’ll play the game) they’ve closed the stadium’s retractable roof. Smart move – rock music is always better under cover of as much darkness as possible. Metallica’s stage setup is a sight to behold; a gigantic ring surrounded by eight speaker towers twice as tall as most people’s houses. Directing us around this crashed spaceship are what feels like thousands of stewards, security and tech staff. If nothing else, this show is a phenomenal feat of logistics.

Stadium shows are strange beasts. Lacking the thrilling intimacy of a smaller venue, these shows have to instead impress via bombast and scale. Knocked Loose, no strangers to smaller venues, open up proceedings with their brand of modern metalcore. The young five-piece make great use of the ringed stage, two-stepping around it with impressive confidence; the future is in safe, very heavy hands.

Next up are Gojira. Metallica and their team have chosen two stellar support acts here – ones with underground credit in the bank, in spite of their huge popularity. Gojira, indeed, are one of the biggest French bands of all time, and boast all the panache and flair of an act that belongs in such stadium environs. Across 11 tracks, highlighted by the back-to-back punch of the cosmic-scaled Flying Whales into the Grammy-winning Mea Culpa, their tech/groove metal combination finds a perfect sweet spot between intricate and anthemic.

By the time the main men arrive, the place is ready to explode. A phalanx of stewards make a tunnel for the band to enter through, boxer-style, soundtracked by the longstanding Metallica walk-on anthem, Ennio Morricone’s The Ecstasy Of Gold. Their two opening tracks are, in this writer’s eyes, among their finest: Creeping Death into For Whom The Bell Tolls.

Of the 16 tracks Metallica play tonight, five are from 1991’s Black Album. Various others date from the mid-90s or later. Given that For Whom… and a late rip-through of the eternal Master Of Puppets get the two biggest reactions of the night, a few more tracks from the 1980s albums wouldn’t have gone amiss.

The band sound great, though, and work the stage setup brilliantly. The in-the-round stage is an inherently odd experience, as the band broadly tend to congregate wherever Lars Ulrich’s two drumkits pop up. These kits only appear on one half of the circle, so the band spend far more time on that half than the other. There again, it’s a stadium show, so few of us are very near the artists anyway. At the very least, Metallica’s unique stage offers something different and undeniably striking, in its enormous, yellow-hued grandeur.

The band seem genuinely appreciative of the amount of fans in attendance. Between songs, James Hetfield constantly thanks the audience for their support, and – in a funny and endearing surprise – Kirk Hammett and Rob Trujillo belt out Tom Jones’ Delilah with all the gusto of friends doing karaoke on St. Mary’s Street at 2am.

By the time Enter Sandman finishes and the band have spent five minutes throwing pint cups full of guitar picks into the crowd, you can’t help but feel full and satisfied – like a hearty meal that offers just enough of the flavours you recognise and those you don’t. Come back soon please, lads.

Metallica, Gojira + Knocked Loose, Principality Stadium, Cardiff, Sun 28 June

words TOM MORGAN photos TIM ALBAN