THE HOT TOPIC
REMEMBERING CLIFF BURTON
A new museum in honour of Metallica’s late, great bassist Cliff Burton has been established in Sweden. We went to the opening event
WORDS: JOEL McIVER
IN THE EARLY hours of September 27, 1986, Metallica bassist Cliff Burton died when his band’s tour bus crashed on a country road near the town of Ljungby in southern Sweden. When you visit the site nowadays, the scene appears not to have changed: if you consult the original photos of the bend in the road where the bus spun and fell over, crushing Cliff as he fell through the window, it’s obvious that everything is pretty much the same. It’s a long, empty road in the middle of nowhere, with nothing to be seen for miles, the odd farm building aside.
Well, that’s not quite true: what’s there now that wasn’t there 36 years ago is a full-blown Cliff Burton Museum, which opened on May 14 and is now a meeting point for metalheads who want to pay tribute. The best way to get there is to fly to Copenhagen or Gothenburg and drive the two-hour journey using sat-nav, but public transport is possible too.