How a tribute to a beloved Aussie band became the biggest hit of the Metallica tour

The smart superstars are increasingly using an old formula to win over Aussie audiences during their big stadium and arena shows.

It’s the foolproof trick employed by superstars touring Australia to win hearts and go viral.

Busting out a classic Aussie song or inviting a homegrown hero to share the stage always ramps up the scream-o-meter decibels.

Dua Lipa was the queen of the big Aussie moment during her huge Radical Optimism tour earlier this year, singing Riptide with Vance Joy, Rush with Troye Sivan, Big Jet Plane with Angus Stone and The Less I Know The Better with Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker.

She also covered AC/DC’s Highway To Hell, Kylie Minogue’s Can’t Get You Outta My Head and INXS’s Never Tear Us Apart. And then there was Natalie Imbruglia’s Torn, which is of course itself a cover of the Ednaswap song.

Coldplay have been slipping You’re The Voice into their Aussie sets since they performed it with John Farnham at the Sound Relief benefit concert in Sydney in 2009.

Dua Lipa invited Vance Joy to join her to perform Riptide during her tour of Australia this year. Picture: Naomi Rahim/Getty Images.

The Killers have played INXS and Icehouse hits at their shows and Train gave Gotye’s Somebody That I Used To Know a spin earlier this year during their arena tour.

American country star Jellyroll picked a Keith Urban song (Somebody Like You) and also got the crowd revved up with the classic call-and-response to The Angels’ anthem Am I Ever Gonna See Your Face Again when he was here recently.

The Living End’s Chris Cheney experienced the power of one of the world’s biggest acts covering your song when Metallica performed in Melbourne last month.

During their nightly “Doodle” section of the show, bassist Rob Trujillo and guitarist Kirk Hammett played The Living End’s debut smash hit Prisoner of Society.

Rob Trujillo and Kirk Hammett paid tribute to the Living End during their Melbourne show. Picture: Josh Woning

The crowd went nuts and Cheney’s phone melted down with an avalanche of notification pings.

As he prepares to play that song at the Sydney Opera House forecourt on Friday for the final show of the I Only Trust Rock’n’Roll tour, Cheney said the Metallica moment was mind-blowing.

“I’m standing in a bathroom in Brisbane about to go on stage and trying to get my throat warmed up, as I do, and all of a sudden, ding, and the message ‘Metallica are playing your song on stage,’” he said.

“I remembered I’d seen footage of them playing Zebra by John Butler a few nights before so I thought that maybe they were playing different Australian songs at the shows.

“And then it was like ding, ding, ding, my phone started to blow up. I’m like I can’t look at that right now., I was literally about to walk on stage for the first night of the tour and I pretty nervous at this point.”

The band were about to go on stage for their own show when the big Metallica moment happened. Picture: Supplied.

Cheney said he is yet to discover how Metallica picked The Living End song from the thousands of classic rock hits from other Melbourne acts but assumes they “asked around.”

His pride in his band and that incendiary debut punk hit was further bolstered when friends in the audience reported back to him “the biggest sing along of the night.”

“Like it was the song that everyone in the stadium knew the words to. How cool is that?” Cheney said.

As the band play to some of the bigger audiences of their career on the current tour, drawing a new generation of fans for their potent fusion of rockabilly, punk and rock’n’roll, Cheney said the Metallica cover marked a full circle moment.

“In high school, we were the band that was the anti Metallica. We were playing Buddy Holly and the Crickets, and everyone was making fun of us because of the way we dressed and the music that we played because they were playing Enter Sandman and Sweet Child O’ Mine,” he said.

“Perhaps we weren’t cool, but we thought what we were doing was cool. And here we are, 35 years later, and one of those bands that all the other kids in school were covering are covering our song. How does that happen?” he said.

Prisoner of Society, released back in 1998, remains one of the most popular rock songs in Australia and continues to find a new audience as evidenced by its more than 35 million streams.

Besides the viral videos and cred kudos, an international act covering an Aussie song is also coin for the original songwriters who reap a royalty payment from the live performance.

Originally published as How a tribute to a beloved Aussie band became the biggest hit of the Metallica tour