METALLICA guitarist Kirk Hammett is featured in a new interview with UltimateGuitar.com. An excerpt is available below.

UG: You have just released the Australia & New Zealand themed EP “Six Feet Down Under”. Do you tend to record a lot of your live shows?

Hammett: "For the last ten years or so we have been recording all of our shows. But this EP is kind of comped together from a lot of different recordings. Some come from bootleg recordings that were traded on the circuits and some were recordings that are from a taping section where we’d invite people to come to the show and tape it, some of those tracks are culled from those particular recordings. And then some of it is also stuff that we had in our own recording archive."

UG: Have you started in any manner the songwriting process for the next Metallica studio album?

Hammett: "No, but we do have riffs here and there but there are no complete songs as yet. But we all have tons of music that is just lying around, in fact all of us do. That is the great thing about Metallica, there is never any shortage of ideas."

UG: You just performed a series of Big Four shows (with SLAYER, MEGADEH and ANTHRAX); what was the experience like?

Hammett: "The shows were really great and it was a vibe man. It was like the Eighties all over again which was very, very cool. We all kind of realized that we are all in this together and that we all had the same sort of objectives and goals. It’s just that we had different ways of getting them. At the end of the day, it became more of a celebration of the fact that we are all still around and all standing and still functioning as bands, and that was a very cool thing. And it was a chance for us to kind of reflect and look back at all the times we had together and all the battles we had fought. It was good to know that all of us are still here and still doing it."

Go to this location for the complete interview.

According to Blair Ensor from Stuff.co.nz, Jamie Woods froze with shock as rock gods Metallica dedicated a track, 'Broken, Beaten & Scarred', to him in front of thousands on Tuesday night.

"I was hurled off the ground because a couple of people recognised me. I was the only one up in the air.

"James [Hetfield, the lead singer of Metallica] pulled the horns at me. I had a big grin staring up at the stage."

The Blenheim man was one of many hard-working fans who campaigned to bring Metallica to Christchurch, although his contribution was more substantial than most. He organised a petition which was distributed around the South Island in May, and gathered 11,285 signatures in one day.

Read more here.