Megadeth’s mr heavy metal

Blimey, who knew former Megadeth guitarist Marty Friedman left the band as didn’t suit his refined taste in music? He told Ultimate Guitar mag:

I didn’t think Megadeth were aggressive enough! It was getting to the point where everything was kind of mid-tempo, old school metal. And there was so much cooler nu metal happening at the time, that I really felt we needed to get modern because this shit that we were doing was not aggressive enough. And our pop stuff was not pop enough.

He now lives in Tokyo, the land of pop, where he’s fluent in Japanese and known as Mr Heavy Metal.

In this Heavy Metal Major League clip, a dude in full Kiss regalia tells Mr Heavy Metal ‘you’re awesome!’ before announcing to Paul Gilbert (aka Mr Big), ‘you suck!’. The host then selects balls painted with alphabet letters from a box and the two axemen must ‘play ball’ by playing a riff from an artist starting with that letter*.

TV in the UK is all The F Word this and X-Factor that. If only the producers would look to Japan…or listen to more heavy metal.

*Gilbert’s first choice of Yngwie Malmsteen for ‘y’ is pretty impressive…but perhaps I just don’t know enough metal guitarists?