Am I Evil?

"Am I Evil?" was written by Sean Harris and Brian Tatler and recorded in March 1980 for Lightning to the Nations (7:39 on the album's track listing, 7:43 on the song's own page). Tatler told Defenders of the Faith that it always starts with the riff: he recorded the main riff on a cassette player and played it to Harris and Kimberley, and the song took about twelve months to finish, with the fast section, intro, outro and solo added later while Harris kept adjusting the lyrics, sometimes between gigs. In 2016 he told Eonmusic it was just a band in a room with a cassette player and that it turned into a beast of a track. He played the whole song with the wah-wah on, double-tracked, one side with it and one without. The band re-recorded it for Borrowed Time (1982) and again in 2020.

Wikipedia paraphrases the lyric as a narrator whose mother was burned as a witch, taking revenge on the twenty-seven people responsible and asking whether he is evil; Tatler said Harris's mother was initially offended by the opening lines. Kerrang! lists it among its fifty most evil songs. Wikipedia names Black Sabbath's "Symptom of the Universe" and Holst's "Mars" as influences on the riff and the opening, but no interview found confirms it. The band's own account of its meaning was not found.

Metallica first played it live on March 14, 1982, put it on the 1982 Metal Up Your Ass demo, recorded it in Sausalito in October 1984 as the B-side of "Creeping Death" (7:50, released November 23, 1984), and included it on Garage Inc. (1998). Tatler says Metallica were the first band to cover a Diamond Head song, that the arrangement is exactly the same and that it has appeared on eighteen Metallica releases. He joined Metallica on stage at Sonisphere Knebworth on July 8, 2011, and at Tons of Rock in Oslo on June 26, 2024. Setlist.fm lists 418 Diamond Head performances, the most of any of the band's songs. Which version our upload is, the 1980 original, the 1982 re-recording or the 2020 one, was not established.