CUE the Point Depot on the evening of the recent Metallica concert: Eoghan Cleary, Metallica fan, can barely control himself. Half an hour before the band is due on stage, he dashes over to the barricade near the stage door, shouting, "are they going to walk by here, are they going to walk by here?" Behind him, several thousand mostly male fans, in a similar state of almost fluid excitement, also noisily anticipate the arrival of their idols. But what, exactly, is it about Metallica that has hauled Eoghan, for example, all the way from Clare to here for this concert?

"When I was studying for my Leaving, all I ever had on was Metallica and they used to blow me away," he says. "Because the message they have is that no matter what is depressing you, there is always something that can lift you up, another thing to aim for, an ambition you can have. That comes across in Master Of Puppets, which is anti drugs; The Unforgiven, which is about one man's struggle against the world, and Sad But True, which is a struggle with the soul. Powerful. Of all the heavy metal bands, they've got a bit of intelligence; they don't just sing about death, destruction, mass murder. That's why I'm here!"

Cut to idol, in dressing room: Lars Ulrich, main spokesman for Metallica. The first thing that must be said about this guy is that he is exceedingly cool. And knows it, adopting rock pose number 442 by insisting on fiddling with an electric guitar throughout our conversation, which, I guess, is better than had he dabbled away on his more usual instrument: drums. Thankfully, this pose of studied cool evaporates during the fifteen minute but I speak so fast it'll be like twenty minutes with anyone else!" interview. So, quickly, what is Lars' response to Eoghan's comment?

It's a ways great when someone gets something positive out of our music. A lot of people, who don't know much about what we do, approach it in a cynical sense, talking about the dark and doomy stuff but a tremendous amount of people get uplifting things out of our work," he says.

"There' are a lot of kids in America that tell me they were ready to top themselves off, then listen to a Metallica song for the last thing that they heard - and that gave them hope, a newfound will to look at different angles in life. Through, say, something like Fade To Black."

That said, in songs like Blackened Metallica obviously drag their fans across a post apocalyptic landscape to, ostensibly, bring them towards that dawn, Likewise, in both the song and video for Enter Sandman, the characteristic male "kid" in question is terrified of sleep because it leads only to nightmares. In many of their other songs what is celebrated, at a core level, is the ability to survive, to be a kind of Arnie Schwarzenegger, armed with a brace of thrash metal guitars, duelling with all manner of demons, and winning. So what is all this, a belief in the ancient act of catharsis?

"It's life, isn't it? You can't have light without the dark, and if one doesn't acknowledge all the different facets of life, then one is not looking at the big picture," counters Lars.

"And when it comes to music, plays, books, movies, the things that are the most interesting, to me, are the things that are most open to interpretation. The problem for Metallica is that we are dealing with the most conservative music form that exists: metal, It encourages change the least, frowns upon anything different, musically, lyrically, in terms of the way you look, everything. But we've always set ourselves apart from other bands in our genre by saying, `we don't want to be pigeon holed.' And, `if you want to come along with us, be prepared for a ride that covers a lot of different ground'. We've always tried to make people more open to variations than those that are placed on us by fans or critics, whatever.

In this sense, Lars agrees that Metallica basically redefined thrash, moving from the relatively linear soundscapes of prototype metal bands like Motorhead to multi dimensional, riff driven, rhythmically propulsive compositions of their own, such as early cuts like The Call Of Ktulu right up to Bleeding Me from the new album.

But let's get back to the question of subject matter in these songs. Lars says their music acknowledges all "different facets of life"; nevertheless, some critics found offensive the fact that Ronnie, on the new album, focuses on the Dunblane massacre.

It was inspired by that," says Lars. "And, first of all, I never defend anything we do. But if I had to defend that song at gun point [laughs] I would say that you open your eyes and this is the world you see. We used to write a lot more, as a result of opening up a newspaper or turning on CNN. But, of late, we've let the songs come from within, less third person, more first person. Things like Mama Said, King Noting, The House That Jack Built, Poor Twisted Me.

"But Ronnie was the last song written for this album, and it had a different set of lyrics which just didn't cut it, so we wrote a new set a few days after that massacre. It inspired a sadness and an acceptance of the fact that this kind of stuff does go on and everyone has different ways of dealing with it."

Flicking back to the question of fans, Lars admits to feeling "hemmed in" by audience expectations "in Europe, in particular" where, he claims, the "genre of metal is frowned upon" in general. "In America we're a mainstream rock band - there's us, U2, REM, Pearl Jam," he says. "Whereas in Europe it's probably U2, REM, Oasis and then, when you get into metal world, Metallica, as the one big acceptable face of a music that is seen as the silly little kid in the family. And even the gender breakdown of our audience in Europe is different, in that it is mostly guys, whereas in the States it's 50-50, sparing all ages, social groups, races.

So how have the fans responded to the new album and new look, which led Vox magazine to suggest "they look more like Britpop wannabees than mean metal muthas"?

"There are those who are with us and respect us and will try to get something out of everything we do, because they know we will always go in different directions," says Lars. "But then there are people who are not quite as open and feel the new record is not as metal as the last ones, or who want us to do the same thing we did in 1986. Then you get into the idiotic level, like `you cut your hair, now I don't like your band any more'. I say if the length of my hair makes a difference, I don't want you to buy the record, anyway. There are a lot of bands who emulate what we were doing 10 years ago, go listen to them.

"But if there is one thing that is really uninspiring, it is doing something you've already done long ago. Some fans do complain because we don't do the hard, thrashy, machine gun stuff we used to do. But the new album definitely does have its roots more in a 1970s hard rock, bluesy, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, Thin Lizzy thing."

COMPARING grunge bands like Pearl Jam to their predecessors in the 1970s, Lars recently suggested they don't really "connect" with their audiences. Why?

"They're very inward, in their outward actions!" he elaborates, laughing. "We come more from the old school of trying to make the live show, instead of us and them, one big thing. A lot of the new bands seem less inclined to go for the sing along, wave along feel of the 1970s where, instead you have maybe Eddie Vedder, up there, wrestling with his demons.

"But I don't think a lot of that holds water. We wrestle with demons, but not so much on stage, as when we create the music, in the studio. In a studio it can be very protective and inward, but once you go up on a stage and share those energies with, say, 15,000 people there has to be an acknowledgement of the shared energy, back and forth. Some of those other bands do not acknowledge that communal energy. We do."

But, in the end, to what purpose? As in Enter Sandman, is the music of Metallica an attempt to keep fans - and the band itself from sinking into life long inertia, yielding to sleep, even yielding to death? Is their particular metal battle cry basically fear made flesh?

"If you look back on our career, `fear' definitely is a key word," he says, having contemplated the question, and already extended the interview by nearly 10 minutes, despite repeated calls to get ready for the gig. "Fear of anything, from authority to being in situations that you can't control. If you wanted to generalise you could say that all of us, in the band, are very wary of control, of authority, so some of that basically sneaks through in all our work. From the first album right up to the latest."