Five Songs, Four Cellos – Apocalyptica Take Us Through Their Favourite Metallica Tracks

Orion

For me, it was the very first song I heard from Metallica when I was like 13 years old and it's been a very, very, very important song for me. It was the one song that blew me away originally. And we never recorded it before, but then we wanted to do it, to take it for the tour. It's an instrumental track and it has so many different worlds, you know, it has the hard parts, and it has some kind of inner power and energy that really, I really like. And it has a beautiful middle section and everything. So I think that that somehow describes the world of Metallica, all attachments are torn down kind of, you know, taken off, and the chorus is really pure.

Battery

We did a no drum version as a bonus track for the re-release of the album (Plays Metallica By Four Cellos). But live we played with a drummer, with Mikko [Sirén]. I love how it’s majestic, you know, the intro really has a feeling like, "Ok, something great is going to happen now." And I just love the extreme speed of that. And because I play the riff and technically, it's on the extreme level. And in a live situation, I just love it that, you know, when you feel like you're fucking dying when playing. You need to always push yourself beyond your boundaries to get it done… It's a combination of extreme sports and music. Sometimes we play so super, super insanely fast in the show that we are sometimes blown away by ourselves after the song, like, "What the fuck happened?" The song has so much primitive energy in it, so it really feeds us. I love it.

Seek And Destroy

It's kind of funny that because when we played it live, we’d also never recorded it before, only as a bonus track for the re-release of the first album, but we have played it live for a long time. And for some reason, in combination with our other songs that we play live, that turns out to be the party song. You know, people who know the song – who doesn't know the lyrics? – they just go for it…

People who know the Metallica stuff they sing along. But you know, we always have tonnes of the audience that have no idea how the original songs go. So that's an interesting combination, but actually on Seek And Destroy I always sing the chorus for people to sing it with. I always guide them to sing, "Searching, seek and destroy." So, it's a combination of people who know the lyrics, they just know them and they sing along, but also people who have no idea about the lyrics. They just enjoy the song, because the song is great itself. It's the most party, most celebration song of our set...

I think it's the last song of our second set. So people are really in the world and they are loose in their bodies. And Seek And Destroy gives the final freedom to get crazy. 

One

I have always been a big, big sucker for the combination of beauty and rawness. Like, melancholic, beautiful stuff, in connection with something really brutal and aggressive. And One is actually combining those elements really well. We play with drums, but the drums are coming in from this technical place [Toppinen sounds out the famous machine gun double kick drumming from the song]. So it’s without drums until then.

It was funny, when we played with Metallica, we played One with them at their 30th anniversary. I was at the rehearsals going, "Ok Lars [Ulrich], what about if we do that so you don't play in the beginning. We play until the double kick drum section just without you and we just play cellos and James [Hetfield]." And Lars is like, "What the fuck? I will go home then. I won't play at all." He was just joking….

We played the version and it was actually very, very cool. And not having drums in the first half of song actually brings up more the beauty of the composition. But I love the song, it's a beautiful song.

Welcome Home (Sanitarium) 

I think from the ...Four Cellos version, it's most versatile. And that's the last song of the first set before the intermission in the show. And it has also the same kind of things that One has – it’s really, really beautiful and still it has the power and the energy and the raw feeling on the faster section. I like it for pretty much the same reasons that I like One. But the cello version works out really, really well.