Dave Mustaine of Megadeth said during a recent interview that the Big 4 should reunite. The group consists of Megadeth, Metallica, Slayer , and Anthrax.
Known as the Big Four of Thrash, the groups performed together for the first time on June 16, 2010 at the Sonisphere festival at Bemowo Airport in Warsaw, Poland, and followed it up with six more shows as part of the Sonisphere series that same year.
They reunited several times in 2011. The last Big Four show took place on September 14, 2011, at Yankee Stadium in New York. Since then, Metallica, Slayer, and Anthrax have played several shows together, including the 2013 Soundwave festival in Australia. They also performed at the 2014 Heavy MTL festival in Montreal, Quebec, Canada.
Mustaine spoke about the possibility of another Big Four show in a new interview with Greg Prato of Songfacts . “I really think it’s time for the guys in Metallica to rock one last round, see if we can get Slayer out of retirement and do a Big Four, passing the torch to the new Big Four. It remains to be seen who they will be.”
“I think it would be really cool symbolically if we did something, like, at the LA Coliseum, even if it’s just a one-off show and that’s it,” he continued. “Slayer is from Los Angeles, so it would probably be more convenient for them to go home at night. I, personally, have been hoping for this for a while and I keep asking and asking and asking. They’re just not interested. But that’s up to them.”
In 2018, Mustaine said he would like to play at a Big Four show where all the bands “were treated fairly,” rather than Metallica performing a longer set and having more stage space than the other groups in the project.
“It always bothered me to watch Kirk Hammett [Metallica guitarist] say on the DVD [ The Big Four: Live From Sofia, Bulgaria ], when they’re praying before the show, and he says, ‘We are the Big One,’” Mustaine told SiriusXM . “That just shows the mentality at the time – that it really wasn’t the Big Four; it was Metallica and then the three of us.”
Hammett said in 2017 that he believed the Big Four would be revisited again. He explained: “I see these shows as a sort of celebration – a real celebration of each other, and a real celebration of the music we all make, and a real celebration of the audience accepting [what] we’ve done. And why not have more of that?”
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