Controversies aside, he’s always been a political animal – just listen back to the title track of Megadeth’s mighty second album, 1986’s Peace Sells… But Who’s Buying?, in which Dave scythes down Big Politics in a way that no metal musician had done before or has done since. Love him or loathe him, Dave Mustaine can never be accused of playing it safe. “People being able to say stuff from behind a keyboard, just lashing out. “The sad thing is the cowardice of the internet,” he says. For a natural born motormouth, he’s being uncharacteristically cautious – presumably, he doesn’t want to get burned again. We speak eight days before the most contentious US election in history, and Dave’s radar is primed for questions relating specifically to that or politics in general.

(If we’re being honest it was also Megadeth’s last true end-to-end classic, though 2009’s Endgame came very close.)īut there’s something else lurking in the background. 5 in the UK), and it marked the point where the bitterness that fuelled his early career finally dissipated – he was no longer “the guy who got booted out of Metallica”, he was a properly successful artist in his own right.

That record gave them the biggest hit of their career (No. He’s here to talk about the 20th anniversary reissue of Megadeth’s fifth album, Countdown To Extinction.

30 essential thrash metal bands that aren't the big four (opens in new tab)īut today, Dave is perplexingly humble, not to mention polite, reasonable and uncontroversial, to the point where you wonder if he might have been brainwashed by the CIA (something which he once claimed has happened to US soldiers) or kidnapped by aliens and replaced with a robot (something which, in fairness, he has never claimed has happened, though there’s still time).

The 50 best Metallica songs of all time (opens in new tab).

How Dave Mustaine took on cancer and won (opens in new tab).

Megadeth’s Rust In Peace: the inside story of the greatest thrash album of the ’90s (opens in new tab).

Dave mustaine 1992