About last night.
I’m quite certain the concert last night was the best I’ve attended so far. It was like 2 classes above Judas and Slayer, for example, and I think that is true mostly because Hetfield is not a singer, but a real frontman. And that’s rare. What that means is that it is not they who perform in a spectacle and the audience is watching them - rather the audience is part of their performance. The sound was almost perfect, the only dawnside being the bad resonance of the stadium. The stage was not linear, but rather had a bulge (quite big) which allowed the band to move closer to the middle of the crowd. Even the concert was quite long - about 2 hours and a half I think - and they didn’t took it easy at all, although they are now closer to 60yo than 50.
I knew they were going to play Creeping Death (my favourite), but I didn’t expect them to also play Ride the Lightning (which is probably my second favourite) and For whom the bell tolls (I don’t think they performed this during the European leg of this tour before).
There were also some small tributes - one to a local band (Iris - which is shit imo) and one to Cliff Burton.
Hetfield has some cool jokes actually. Everytime he changed his guitar he said something like “I have so many cool guitars”.
The show had a prolonged end - the classical Seek and Destroy and a planed encore - Spit out the Bone, Nothing Else Matters and Enter Sandman. In fact, Enter Sandman was played using a pick which had the Arch of Triumph on one front and on the other the date and “Metallica”. Also, during Spit out the Bone, the screens showed Metallica overimposed on the national Romanian flag. Oh, and there were fireworks in the end :).
Extra: I later found out that they have donated half a million euros for a local NGO which builds a hospital for children who have cancer. They donated to every country they have visited but this is by far the largest ammount. Good guys, Metallica.