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In garages, basements, school halls, churches and youth clubs up and down this and plenty of other countries, teenagers have gathered to play music together. Most of them won’t get beyond playing for a few friends, with practise amps drowned out beneath an out-of-tune drum kit. Some will go further, playing pubs and small clubs for a local following before fizzling out with a couple of demos to prove that they existed. But all will fantasise about the big-time; that possibly extinct or maybe always fictional place where their idols will come to consider them peers and a new legion of fans will come to idolise them in turn. A place where glory and money come easily, the guitar is never out of style and 10,000 tickets for an arena show will sell out in twenty minutes. But in the early 1990s the big-time and Bridgend in Wales were not well acquainted.
Yet, somehow, in 2006 a young man from Bridgend was sitting on stage at the Tallinn Song Festival Grounds in Estonia. The grounds were the site of a traditional festival of national significance to the Estonians but they were also used as land-for-hire for large-scale concerts and tonight Metallica were playing. It was perfectly clear that day at the site, nestled in the Bay of Tallinn, with Helsinki just ninety kilometres across the Gulf of Finland – so from behind his kit, with the sun not yet set, Michael ‘Moose’ Thomas had an uninterrupted view of the 105,000 people that had come for Metallica. And the gig had a special significance for him and his band too. Metallica were the band that they had idolised as teenagers. Just a few years ago they were memorising their riffs in bedrooms, covering their songs in cramped rehearsal spaces, learning the cut and thrust of a heavy metal song as practised by the masters of the form. They had been on a band outing in 1996 to see Metallica play on the Load tour. And now not only were they supporting them at their own show but, as Moose looked to the side of the stage, he could see Lars Ulrich and James Hetfield watching their set. He forced himself to keep his eyes forward. It was all he could to keep his concentration. And yet, as the middle eight of his band’s biggest single to date crashed in, he couldn’t help but sneak a glance. Lars and James were playing air guitar. It was better than even a boyhood fantasy would dare to allow.
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But no aspiring young musician is going to fulfil his dreams alone, particularly if he’s idolising Metallica and Pantera, and Matt was not alone. Since joining his secondary school at the age of eleven – Ogmore School, in the north of the town – he had been hanging out with Michael Thomas. Some people are just destined to get a nickname that more or less replaces their given name and Thomas is one of those people; to future fans, he would always be simply Moose. (He’s been somewhat evasive as to the origin of his beastly sobriquet, with explanations offered that include the size of his manhood, his style of making love, or his cavemanlike mentality. However, a more sensible suggestion that’s been offered is that it’s a childhood nickname based on his favourite animal.)
Moose had grown up listening to Queen with his dad – Queen are often credited as one of the progenitors of thrash thanks to their song ‘Stone Cold Crazy’, so perhaps they had more of an impact on the impressionable Moose than he would later let on. But for him, the band that changed it all was Nirvana. Where grunge can be said to have sprung from the same well as heavy metal, Nirvana’s sound had more to do with the noisy art rock of Sonic Youth and the Pixies than the focused rage of Metallica.
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