Walking into the Antrim Forum ahead of Megadeth's first ever gig in Northern Ireland, on May 11, 1988, Dave Mustaine spotted a red-haired teenager by the metal fence surrounding the venue asking for an autograph, and walked over to scrawl his name. The reaction he received was not what he had expected.
“Fuck you Dave Mustaine!” the kid shouted, then spat in Mustaine's face.
Looking back on the incident for his book Rust In Peace: The Inside Story Of The Megadeth Masterpiece, Megadeth's frontman recalls being furious, but was pacified somewhat when a local crew member explained that the gesture was intended as a sign of respect, and was an everyday compliment from Irish punks.
“Respect?” Mustaine writes in the book. “Is that right?”
As bizarre and baffling as the logic may appear, this was actually true at the time. This writer recalls Slayer being equally nonplussed at getting the same reaction at Belfast's Ulster Hall four months later on their first visit to Northern Ireland, a horrified Kerry King and Tom Araya vowing never to return to the country even as they politely signed autographs for myself and my friends at the venue's back door, post-gig. Megadeth, however, didn't sign any autographs after their Antrim Forum show, for a good reason: Mustaine's band were driven away from the venue under a police escort after what was possibly the most controversial metal gig ever staged in Northern Ireland.
Metal concerts were still something of a rarity in Northern Ireland in the '80s. Such was the nervousness around visiting the country during a conflict referred to as The Troubles that not one of Iron Maiden's world-conquering mega-tours stopped off in 'The Province' during the decade, the Londoners choosing to playing Budapest, Belgrade, Biloxi, Brisbane, Bethlehem, Bologna, Barcelona and literally hundreds of other cities worldwide before they ever touched down in Belfast. Those who did visit in the early '80s - Ozzy Osbourne, Dio, Thin Lizzy among them - were greeted by wildly passionate crowds, and made promises to return. In the second half of the decade, thrash metal bands - including all four of The Big 4 - entertained Northern Irish crowds at sell-out gigs, and accepting shows started to seem less of a risk.
Ironically, there was a certain amount of controversy around booking Megadeth into the Antrim Forum, as conservative and deeply religious members of the local council expressed some reservations about hosting a band who they felt had ‘connotations of devil worship and satanism.’ As reported in the Antrim Guardian, venue manager Alan Moneypenny assured those of a nervous disposition that there would be no danger.
“Megadeth are an American heavy metal band and while I agree they have a strange name, I can give an assurance that Antrim Forum would never host a concert which would in any way be involved with the kind of activities which people have expressed concern about,” he told the council chamber.
“We have had many heavy metal concerts in the past and they have been hugely popular with young people. We have never had any trouble whatsoever. We had Dio with us a couple of years ago and it was a sell-out. The young people were well-behaved and the police will confirm that.”
What could possibly go wrong?
As he sat backstage ahead of the gig, Dave Mustaine was informed that bootleg T-shirts were being sold inside the venue. When a roadie was dispatched to stop this, the vendor calmly explained that the shirts were being sold to raise money for 'The Cause', a somewhat nebulous term which essentially referred to fundraising for whatever paramilitary faction held sway in any given area: drinkers in Irish bars in Boston, Massachusetts or Kilburn, north west London dropping dollars and pounds into pint glasses for 'The Cause' in the 1980s were assuredly not giving financial support to the same 'team' as those dropping coins into collection tins passed around in pubs in East Belfast or Antrim. The concept isn't one easily understood by outsiders, so the fact that Mustaine didn't grasp what he was being told pre-show shouldn't be held against him. “I had no idea what that meant, but it sounded cool,” Mustaine admitted in the Rust In Peace book.
The gig itself started in typically raucous fashion: “It was our first time there,” Mustaine noted, “and everybody was going mad.”
Being one of those in attendance, aged 17, this writer can attest to that. In the two years since the release of Metallica's Master Of Puppets, Slayer's Reign In Blood and Megadeth's own Peace Sells... But Who's Buying? the popularity of thrash metal had soared, and in releasing their third studio album So Far, So Good... So What! in January '88, Megadeth had got the jump on their peers, and were initially welcomed like gods by those in attendance. Except that, traditionally, it's not customary to spit on gods, even in Northern Ireland.
Having (over) indulged with Guinness and cocaine pre-show, Mustaine no longer seemed swayed by the whole 'respect' argument, or perhaps he too was showing respect when he decided to spit back in the direction of his most 'respectful' fans. This did not go down at all well, and gobs of spit quickly turned into hails of plastic beer glasses and coins being hurled in his direction. Tensions were ratcheted up even further when a visibly and audibly fucked-off Mustaine called out one of those abusing him, challenging him to come onstage and talk face-to-face: when the guy in question seemed keen to do just that, Mustaine unstrapped his Jackson Flying V guitar, held it by its neck, and swung it viciously like a baseball bat at the youth's head, missing connecting with his skull by inches. At this point, Megadeth crew members physically dragged the out-of-control musician off the stage for his own safety.
To say that the vibe in the room was tense at this point would be a massive understatement. A more level-headed entertainer might taken a few deep breaths, calmed himself down, returned to the stage with an apology for losing his head, and carried on with the show. This was not what Dave Mustaine opted to do. Instead, after fortifying himself with shots and rails of cocaine behind his amps, Megadeth's leader returned to the fray and introduced his band's snarling cover of the Sex Pistols Anarchy In The UK with the words, “Give Ireland back to the Irish. This one is for the cause.”
Holy fuck.
“It was like I had set off a bomb in the audience,” Mustaine would later reflect, a somewhat insensitive comment given his location, but a rather apt comparison.
Never before or since has this writer witnessed a gig atmosphere as charged as that which resulted from Mustaine's comments. An often-abused minority in itself, the metal community in Northern Ireland was generally spared the sectarian bitterness which bedevilled other sections of society, and seats on the minibus which ferried our little group of metalheads from Newcastle, County Down to Antrim that evening were divided equally between Catholics and Protestants. But Mustaine's comments put the entire venue into 'fight or flight' mode, with everyone looking around to see exactly who was cheering Mustaine's comment, who was booing, and who might be aiming a punch at a friend's head based on a quick evaluation of this survey. Most of us froze with fear, awaiting the worst, and the worst in Northern Ireland in the '80s when it came to sectarian violence could be pretty fucking bad.
The end of a gig has never come as such a blessed relief.
“I wake up the next morning, we're in Dublin, and [bassist] David Ellefson and I are having breakfast and he won't speak to me, and I'm like, What gives?,” Mustaine later recalled. “He goes, 'You don't remember what happened last night?' No, I don't. He goes, 'We were escorted out of Northern Ireland back to Dublin in a bullet-proof bus.”
The next day, soberly reflecting on the incident in his band's dressing room at Rock City in Nottingham, Mustaine began writing lyrics about the experience, those lyrics forming the basis of Holy Wars... The Punishment Due, the opening track, and lead-off single, from Megadeth album number four, Rust In Peace.
In his book dissecting the album, Mustaine wrote, “The first verse came straight out of my experience at Antrim: Brother will kill brother spilling blood across the land, Killing for religion, something I don't understand.”
When the Antrim Guardian revisited the story behind the song in 2016, Mustaine was bombarded with messages on social media, and responded in a contrite manner.
“Honestly, I deeply regret it,” he posted on Twitter. “I clearly was misinformed and was drunk. I totally understand, respect and apologise.”
At some point in the late '90s, interviewing Mustaine face-to-face in London, I pulled my rather 'distressed' gig ticket from the night out of my pocket and asked if it brought back memories. “Oh, you were there...” he spluttered, looking rather sheepish. “Yeah...”
We exchanged knowing looks, and left it at that.
