35 years later, James Hetfield is still amazed by Metallica’s pyro before playing One

Footage of Metallica singer/guitarist James Hetfield reacting to the heavy metal titans’ pyro show has gone viral.

A short clip of the 60-year-old sitting offstage and watching the pyro show that precedes performances of the band’s 1988 track One shows him still being impressed by the scale of it all.

Watch the video below.

The clip was filmed at an undisclosed date on the band’s ongoing M72 world tour.

The tour features ‘no repeat weekends’, where Metallica perform a pair of two-hour-long shows at the same venue without ever playing the same song twice.

The band will next perform at PGE Narodowy in Warsaw, Poland, on July 5 and 7.

They’ll play two further shows in Europe – at the Estadio Cívitas Metropolitano in Madrid, Spain, on July 12 and 14 – before trekking across North and Central America in August and September.

See the full list of Metallica’s 2024 tour dates below.

On a recent episode of official podcast The Metallica Report , Hetfield opened up about the anxiety issues he faced in advance of the first 2024 M72 dates, which were the band’s first full-length concerts in six months.

“I start to doubt myself,” Hetfield confessed, “[thinking,] ‘We're old, we can’t do this’ – all that bullshit everyone tells themselves before they go into something they care about.”

He added that he’d even had nightmares of malfunctioning equipment.

“So, having the nightmares about how I’m the only one who cares about what we're doing here: ‘Where is everybody?’

“I show up at the gig, everyone’s goofing off, or there’s 200 people backstage and thinking, ‘Where’s my stuff? Where’s the setlist? What songs are we doing?’

“And then, typical things like the guitar neck is made of rubber, and there are only two strings on it. And, ‘Where's my roadie?’, and the guitar cord won’t let me get to the microphone. Silly stuff like that.

“That has to happen, and I don’t freak out over it. All you do is you practice, and then you build that comes back pretty quickly.”

Metallica are touring to promote their 2023 album 72 Seasons .

Metallica 2024 tour dates:

Jul 05: Warsaw PGE Narodowy, Poland
Jul 07: Warsaw PGE Narodowy, Poland
Jul 12: Madrid Estadio Cívitas Metropolitano, Spain
Jul 14: Madrid Estadio Cívitas Metropolitano, Spain

Aug 02: Foxborough Gillette Stadium, MA, USA
Aug 04: Foxborough Gillette Stadium, MA, USA
Aug 09: Chicago Soldier Field, IL, USA
Aug 11: Chicago Soldier Field, IL, USA
Aug 16: Minneapolis US Bank Stadium, MN, USA
Aug 18: Minneapolis US Bank Stadium, MN, USA
Aug 23: Edmonton Commonwealth Stadium, Canada
Aug 25: Edmonton Commonwealth Stadium, Canada
Aug 30: Seattle Lumen Field, WA, USA
Sep 01: Seattle Lumen Field, WA, USA
Sep 20: Mexico City Foro Sol, Mexico
Sep 22: Mexico City Foro Sol, Mexico
Sep 27: Mexico City Foro Sol, Mexico
Sep 29: Mexico City Foro Sol, Mexico