British heavy metal book author Joel McIver is featured in a new interview with Robert Gray at Ultimate-Guitar.com. An excerpt appears below:

Ultimate-Guitar.com: In writing To Live Is To Die: The Life And Death Of METALLICA's Cliff Burton, what were your motives? In writing the book, what did you wish to achieve?

Joel McIver: "I'd wondered for years why no-one had written a book about Cliff, and when I came up with the idea of doing a book about him in 2006 or thereabouts, I asked myself what it would need to achieve. First, it would need to be a celebration of his immense playing and songwriting talents. Then it would need to reveal him as he truly was, not as some posthumously sanctified icon. It would also have to provide value for the reader over and above the information which is available elsewhere (not that there's much). Finally, it would have to try and match up to Cliff's own high standards and meet the expectations of those he left behind. No pressure then..."

Ultimate-Guitar.com: Given Cliff Burton's untimely death, how do you feel his absence left a hole in Metallica's life? How did his absence affect later Metallica albums?

Joel McIver: "The other guys were understandably distraught by his death, but there was never any real likelihood that they would quit afterwards. They recruited Jason Newsted immediately and carried on, which was the right commercial decision but didn't allow them any time to grieve: all that emotion had to be bottled up, as they've said many times. That led to serious consequences and was one of the factors which almost destroyed the band in 2002. That's the impact which his death had.

It's hard to say how Cliff's absence affected their later work: if he'd still been around I think they would still have recorded Justice and the Black Album – although what would have happened in the 1990s with him still on board, I don't know."

Read the whole interview at this location.