WATCH: The Grammy Awards mistakenly play Metallica as Megadeth accept their award

The metallers scooped Best Metal Performance for Dystopia ahead of Korn, Gojira, Baroness and Periphery and accepted their honour at a sparsely attended pre-telecast ceremony.

However, inexplicably, the Grammy Awards in house band played Metallica’s seminal anthem ‘Master of Puppets’ as Dave Mustaine, David Ellefson, Kiko Loureiro and Dirk Verbeure made their way to the stage.

Graciously not mentioning the fact his former band were played, Dave said: “Wow. Fantastic! We took 12 tries to get this. Last time we were here, we were talking to Kenny G, and he asked me how many times we were here, and he goes, 'Well, 11 isn't that bad.' And I said, 'How many times did it take you?' And he said, 21.' And I was, like, 'Oh, my god. If it takes 21 times, I don't know if I'll live that long.'"

"I want to thank Jesus Christ, I wanna thank my wife, my children, all the band's wives and kids, I wanna thank our management, our label, our agent, our attorney, our crew, all of you, especially the metal community. I think it's a little weird that we ended up being category 69, but somebody's got a sense of humour."

Later on at the main event, Metallica and Lady Gaga’s performance of ‘Moth Into Flame’ was blighted with technical issues with James Hetfield’s mic not working for the first half of the song.

Visibly frustrated, he ended the collaboration by kicking over his mic stand and throwing his guitar off stage. You can see the footage here.