Thank God we weren’t there that day! So we finally go to visit our management company, and there’s a tape of Marty Friedman there. This one guy came in and goes, ‘Alright, I’m ready! Just show me the songs!’ and I just thought, ‘Get the fuck out of here!’ Two days after we’d finished doing the auditions we heard that the manager of the studio was found with his head chopped off, dead in a dumpster. “We were auditioning guitarists and all these guys would come in and start playing and it was terrible. That was the beginning of the end for Jeff and Chuck.” Unfortunately this time the transfer didn’t happen as gracefully as we might have hoped we had to abandon the rest of the tour and go home. We’d gone there before and when we ran out of drugs, we’d swap to booze.

“We did seven shows with Iron Maiden and the Monsters Of Rock festival – we’d died and gone to heaven.

“When we went overseas the drug thing was over the top,” Dave recalls. The story behind every song on Metallica’s Kill ’Em All – in their own words (opens in new tab).The 50 best Metallica songs of all time (opens in new tab).The 20 greatest American metal bands ever (opens in new tab).How Dave Mustaine took on cancer and won (opens in new tab).Things came to a rather calamitous head during what should have been a triumphant trip to Europe to play several shows with Iron Maiden, culminating in a fateful performance at Donington’s Monsters Of Rock Festival on August 20, 1988. Unfortunately, as their momentum increased, the lineup that made So Far… – Dave, bassist David Ellefson, guitarist Jeff Young and drummer Chuck Behler – were in the midst of a collective addiction to heroin that was threatening to derail the band. Lineup volatility aside, Dave was beginning to enjoy the fruits of his labours, as international acclaim and respect for his efforts to push metal forward led to bigger tours, bigger hits and a very evident upward trajectory.

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