Metal Hammer recently caught up with Metallica guitarist Kirk Hammett to discuss launching Exodus back in the '70s, then leaving the band to join Metallica. Following is an excerpt from the chat.

Metal Hammer: What are your memories of starting Exodus?

Hammett: "As a kid growing up in the late '70s, I was just looking for the hardest thing I could find. I was way into UFO and Judas Priest and Thin Lizzy, and I had recently discovered the New Wave Of British Heavy Metal and this stuff that was going on in Europe. I gravitated to it. I started playing those songs, and my guitar style started to incorporate facets of what all those bands were doing.

And so when I formed Exodus and I started jamming with Tom Hunting, I turned him onto all these bands and said, ‘This is what we’ve got to do – we’ve got to do something like this.’ I don’t know if you know Tom Hunting, but he’s a very high-strung person. He’s always shaking, or tapping on something, or hitting something. And when he plays drums, he’s kind of that way too. Whenever we’d play a song in the beginning, it started a certain tempo, but three or fours weeks later, it would be twice as fast. And so when we started writing songs, that’s why the beats per minute were up there – because Tom Hunting had a lot of nervous energy. A lot like Lars.

We were just trying to find our sound. I remember months in and months out, in Gary’s (Holt / guitar) garage, playing cover songs, trying to write songs that were as good as the songs we were covering, and just finding ourselves through our instruments and our music and just playing together. For me, that was a really golden time. We were all very naïve and we weren’t jaded at all. We were open to a lot of the bands we were hearing for the first time. We had a vision. And then Metallica came along, and it looked like they’d been at it for a good six or eight months longer than we had been at it, and had all these similar influences."

Metal Hammer: What were your first impressions of Metallica?

Hammett: "I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again, but I thought, ‘These guys are great, but they’d be so much better with me.’ Around that time, Exodus were going through some personnel changes. We just got rid of the previous bass player, and brought another bass player in, and it was a different dynamic within the band. We weren’t rehearsing for some reason or another – I don’t know, maybe Paul Baloff was off doing something. We were kind of going through a hiatus when I joined Metallica."

Metal Hammer: Did you feel guilty about leaving a band you’d started?

Hammett: "Oh yeah. But, y’know, I also left a lot of music with those guys. A lot of the music I wrote ended up on that first album (1985’s Bonded By Blood), and they recorded some other songs that never made it. I never said anything because of the way I left them. I always had guilty feelings about that. Well, not any more…"

Read the complete interview here.