Written by Dave Mustaine is thinking about the last time he will ever step foot onstage as the frontman of Megadeth. “I hope we’ll be playing up in space,” he says. “I think that will be a fitting climax.”
It’s a funny idea, like something Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk would come up with if he was the leader of metal band. Hammer smiles and chuckles at the suggestion. But Dave remains stony-faced. Oh. He’s actually serious. He fixes us with a stare. We’re not smiling anymore.
There’s something unnerving about laughing at something Dave Mustaine says and Dave Mustaine not laughing back. His reputation as one of metal’s most outspoken and prickliest figures precedes him. That famous mop of fiery red hair may be flecked with grey, and he may wear the lines of his 64 years on his face, but his eyes still possess the burning intensity they had when he first rose to prominence more than four decades ago. And when you get that full-force death stare, you find your bollocks quickly retreating to somewhere around your ribcage.
“An anti-gravity thing in space, a full Moon-landing gig, that would be cool,” he continues, holding Hammer’s gaze. “I mean, they sent a whole bunch of celebrities up into space and I thought, ‘Well, if them, why not me?’ I’m watching how it all progresses. I think people are going to be travelling into space a lot sooner than you think.”
We don’t really know if Megadeth really are going to end their career soloing and backflipping in zero gravity. But given this is Dave Mustaine – driven, stubborn, confrontational – you wouldn’t rule it out.
It’s October, and we’re in a photo studio across the road from London’s O2 Arena, where Megadeth will support Disturbed later tonight. Things are running a little late, as Dave hasn’t been feeling well, which is slightly worrying news for anyone who has to interview him.
Even before the band arrive, the studio is full of people. There are representatives from the band’s management and label, who will spend the entirety of our interview silently and awkwardly standing over our shoulder like babysitters, seemingly monitoring every word that’s spoken. Not exactly what you’d expect when it comes to a musician who takes pride in not playing by anybody’s rules except his own.
After an hour of waiting around, Dave and the rest of Megadeth turn up. There’s bassist James LoMenzo, guitarist Teemu Mäntysaari and drummer Dirk Verbeuren, the fourth, 12th and 11th people to do their respective jobs in the band. They’re warm and gregarious to a man, greeting Hammer with handshakes and hugs as Dave hangs back, cradling a black coffee and staring at the floor. A sofa stands in the studio for the interview, though the others don’t sit down until their frontman has taken his place.
How are you, Dave?
“Right this second,” he replies, “I have bronchitis.”
Sorry to hear that. He shrugs.
Now isn’t the ideal time to get Grumpy Dave Mustaine. There’s a lot to talk about. Most importantly, the fact that Dave recently announced he would be wrapping up the band after one final studio album and a farewell tour. This is massive. Give or take a brief period in the early 2000s when the band technically didn’t exist, Megadeth have been central to the metal scene for 40 years. They have released some of the most essential metal albums of all time, as well as a few that have been forgettable at best and bad at worst.
Dave has been there throughout, a three-dimensional character in a world of cardboard cut-outs. He’s done so much to shape this music, first as an early member of Metallica and subsequently with the band he’s led for the past 43 years. He’s charismatic and sometimes outspoken, unafraid of speaking his mind even if it means rubbing people up the wrong way. He’s battled his demons and come out on top. He’s a one-man antidote to many of the safe, sanitised, personality vacuums that pass themselves off as rock stars today. So, it’s really weird to think that we’re approaching a point where Megadeth will be spoken about in the past tense.
“It wasn’t so much a decision, as it was self-awareness,” Dave will later tell us of the reasoning for the end. “This is going to be a long tour, and at the end of it, I want some time to live life.”
Dave Mustaine made the decision to bring Megadeth to an end during the creation of their self-titled seventeenth album. The music was finished, but he had a revelation when he was writing the lyrics.
“I wanted to dedicate 100% to this record, not thinking about what happens down the road,” he says. “I don’t want to be thinking about the next album, the next tour.”
He had a conversation with his bandmates.
“A pretty short discussion,” he says. He doesn’t expand on it, but you’d imagine it involved Dave telling the others: “I’ve decided to end the band after the next tour. Deal with it.”
The good news is that Megadeth is a fitting way to bow out. There’s something on it for fans of pretty much every classic era of the band to enjoy. There’s the vintage thrash of lead single Tipping Point, Made To Kill for the Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying? fans, the super-techy Rust In Peace-style soloing of Let There Be Shred, and Hey God?! for those who enjoy the crunchy arena rock of the Countdown To Extinction era.
And there’s the big curveball: a cover of Metallica’s Ride The Lightning. It’s a song that Dave contributed to during his time in the band, and he has a writing credit on Metallica’s original version. But given his hot-and-cold relationship with his former bandmates, it’s still a surprise.
“I think it was the right time to record it and close the circle,” he says. “It’s back to where I came from. It’s a good song, we played it really well. We sped it up a little bit, but I personally think when you’re going to do a version of a song then you have to make it just as good, or if not better. I really think that we’ve done it just as good the original.”
It seems like an olive branch.
“I’ve always respected James’s [Hetfield’s] playing and so this is a tip of a hat to him and to Metallica for everything that they’ve done, and everything that we’ve done,” he nods. “That legacy that really happened in that teeny little garage in Norwalk, California.”
That version of Ride The Lightning has grabbed the headlines, but the album’s most interesting song is The Last Note. A metallic ballad that closes the record, it finds Dave reflecting on his legacy and how he will be remembered. ‘Let this last note never die,’ he says at the song’s end. It’s a genuinely emotional song, given everything. Was it a hard song to write, Dave?
“Yeah, I cried my ass off,” he replies, rolling his eyes.
Now it’s our turn not to laugh back. It’s the final song on the final Megadeth album, it’s obviously incredibly personal. It’s going to be moving for anyone who has followed the band for all these years. Come on, it must have been emotional. And here, Dave Mustaine actually thaws a little.
“Yeah, you’re right, it was emotional,” he concedes. “Very emotional. I’ve spoken to several guys, men of stature like yourself, and they said they’d been touched by it. I think that is one of the great things you can accomplish in heavy metal, appealing to some of these imposing figures that are not the lilies of the valleys.”
Maybe this all hits that little bit harder given that it comes during a pretty shitty period for metal. The last 12 months have seen the loss of Ozzy Osbourne, Brent Hinds, Kiss guitarist Ace Frehley, At The Gates singer Tomas Lindberg and others. It’s a reminder that for all the genre’s durability, nothing lasts for ever.
“It’s a changing of the guard,” Dave nods. “All of our elder statesmen have satisfied their role as models. Some of the people we lost have really affected me. Lemmy, Dio, Ozzy… you hear about them going and you think, ‘No!’ That’s the way of the world now, though.”
There’s silence in the room as Dave sits for a second and reflects. He’s had his own health issues in recent years, having been diagnosed with throat cancer in 2019. He tells us that he’s currently in remission. When we tell him how pleased we are to hear that, he actually shoots us a smile.
“I’m just dealing with the bumps and bruises from working out,” he quips of his state of health right now. “You’re right, though. I’ve been through a lot of physical shit: Saturday night palsy [the radial nerve condition that left him unable to make a fist], throat cancer, neck fusion, all that stuff. It makes it really hard to do your job.”
Going through those things, coming through the other side, continuing on with the band – does that ever make you consider your own legacy?
“Well, fortunately for me I have a desire to be humble,” Dave replies. “I don’t profess to say I’m humble, but I do have a desire for that. I really don’t think about these things. I have things that I need to do on my farm – cleaning up and feeding animals and working outdoors. When you’re looking after animals you don’t think about these big, heavy metal legacy things, they’re having offspring or they’re sick or they’re dying. I lost a couple of horses, we lost a mom, and we lost a baby in one night…”
It’s a very Dave Mustaine answer, switching a question about his place in the musical landscape into a story about losing a family of horses, and one that sees that initially gruff facade crumbling even further. It’s a diversionary tactic, because it doesn’t appear that Dave Mustaine is entirely comfortable with grandiose statements about his own importance.
When we put it to him that, with the part he played in the development of the early days of Metallica, his creation and massive success of Megadeth and the hit-laden back catalogue he is responsible for, his contribution to thrash metal might be as big as any other individual in history, he looks at the floor and just musters a quick “thank you”. On the other hand, his bandmates are unsurprisingly keen to extol his legacy. Dirk Verbeuren talks of the “profound respect” the rest of Megadeth have for their leader and what he’s built over the last 43 years.
“You’re right, it’s a really important band,” James LoMenzo adds. “We are very aware that we have to be able to do justice to this catalogue and the whole concept of Megadeth. I think Dave is a figurehead on the Mount Rushmore of thrash.”
You have to wonder how easy it is for the rest of Megadeth to be told they’re stopping now. Dirk’s decade-long tenure makes him one of the band’s longer-serving members, but James joined in 2021 (albeit his second stint, after putting in a few years in the 2000s) and Teemu Mäntysaari only came onboard in 2023. Still, talking to them today, they’re giving the impression of men who still seem energised at the thought of being in Megadeth.
“Dave and I are sort of the elder statesmen, so I totally knew what he was talking about regarding the demands,” says James. “It actually made total sense.”
They all sound fine with the arrangement. But maybe they know something we don’t. Sure, Dave Mustaine has announced that Megadeth will be calling it a day after this album and tour, but how many bands have announced they were splitting up only to reform a few years down the line?
Mötley Crüe once signed a legal document that supposedly meant they would never tour again, yet they reunited a few years ago and have regularly been playing live ever since. Megadeth’s friends/rivals Slayer disbanded, then returned a few years later like nothing had happened. Underground bands such as The Dillinger Escape Plan and Botch have reunited in recent years.
Even Megadeth themselves have been here before – Dave announced he was disbanding the group in 2002 after an arm injury left him unable to play guitar. Two years later, they made a Lazarus-like return. A cynical view is that splitting up can be a great career move: band announce final album or tour, sit things out for a while, return a few years later to a resurgence of interest and venues that are significantly bigger than they were at the end of their first run.
Is this what Megadeth are doing?
Dave could easily take this the wrong way. Instead, a grin spreads across his face.
“I don’t think so,” he says. “You see the scuttlebutt that is associated with bands like that. You know they never follow through with it and stick to their word.”
We’re going to hold you to that, Dave. He laughs, like he’s actually enjoying the conversation.
“Look, it all depends on how the statements are crafted,” he replies. “So, we’re doing no more studio albums. Does that mean there might be a live album at the end of all of this? Yeah, it certainly looks that way.”
Whether Megadeth do eventually return or not is up in the air, but with that initial reserve dissipated, you can feel the passion the frontman has for the band and the current line-up. He tells us that he hasn’t had a relationship with a guitarist the same way he does with Teemu since Marty Friedman was in the band in the 1990s. He tells us how much pleasure he still gets when he hears about young kids discovering Megadeth on TikTok and then spotting those same kids seeing the band play live for the first time.
He compares the quality of James’s bass playing to that of Sting and Paul McCartney, and he recalls watching AC/DC early in his career and the lessons he learnt from their command of the stage. Of course, there are a few classic Mustaine-isms sprinkled in there too.
At one point, when we ask about any strong, positive memories he may have about any of his former Megadeth associates, he takes it as a cue to go off on one about a former manager that he had to sack. But in the main, he sounds like a man absolutely in love with being the leader and figurehead of one of metal’s most influential bands. How will he feel on that first day he wakes up and he’s no longer the frontman of Megadeth?
“Well, there’s so much still going on now that I don’t really want to think about that too much. I can’t really conceive of an end right now.”
Indulge us, Dave. There’s a pause.
“I don’t think there is going to be a morning after,” he says with a smile. “I think for all of us, we’re always going to be in Megadeth. We’re always going to be brothers now and best friends, and we’re always going to be responsible for making some of the most fun music that bassists and guitarists and drummers will ever want to play.”
When you’ve dedicated your entire life so obsessively to one project, it’s completely understandable that you might feel this way, but what Dave’s saying does feel closer to a refusal to accept that the end is coming.
Of course, the name Dave Mustaine will always be closely followed by the words “…from Megadeth” whether the band are active or not, but there’s a sneaking suspicion that the idea of what his life looks like when this really comes to an end isn’t something Dave is fully ready to come to terms with yet. Is he doing it because he wants to, or because he feels it’s the correct thing to do? It’s hard to know.
And, it turns out, there’s no time to find out. We’re informed by one of the management team who have been lurking on the periphery that our time is up. We thank the band for their time. Dirk and Teemu are just as warm at the end as they were from the start, and there’s even time to bond with James over a love of cats and a few picture swaps of our respective feline friends.
Once again, Dave hangs back, the last member to say goodbye. Thanks for chatting to us, Dave. We hope you start to feel better soon. He fixes us with a stare once again, except this time his gaze is far from intimidating.
“Thank you,” he replies with genuine warmth. “You know, it was a really fun interview. If you’re coming to the show, make sure you come back and grab a drink with us afterwards.”
After all this time, it turns out Dave Mustaine still has the capacity to surprise. And just as there’ll never be another Megadeth after they do eventually call time on their career, we’ll certainly never see another Dave Mustaine again. Love him or loathe him, he really is box office. We’re going to miss him when he’s gone.
Megadeth is out now via BlkIIBlk. Megadeth play Sonic Temple festival in May and Mystic Festival in June.
