FH: How do you experience different audiences playing live? I've seen Megadeth perform in America, in Europe, and in Japan, and the response seems quite different. You've played with Iron Maiden in Europe in the past, for example, and Maiden is, as we know, a very European band.

DAVE MUSTAINE: Well, you just gotta meet the audience at their own level. If they're Maiden fans and they don't wanna hear about Megadeth, you have to go out there and play for the few Megadeth fans that are there. If they're Megadeth fans, you go out there, play and enjoy yourself.

FH: And the Japanese audience?

DAVE MUSTAINE: The Japanese audience are very particular about what they hear and what you play for them. A lot of the very hard fans want very hard music, yet they're very open to all kinds of experimenting. They also like the special stuff they can feel a kind of an ownership to, something they can feel you've never done anywhere else.

FH: What about the language-barrier in a country like that?

DAVE MUSTAINE: If you give them what they really want, I think you get past that. Sometimes, if they don't understand every single word, it works anyway.

FH: "Return to Hangar" from the new album sounds like a mix of "Hangar 18" and "Into the Lungs of Hell". What were you thinking about while writing it?

DAVE MUSTAINE: Basically a reprise of "Hangar 18". We wanted to do something where we revisited the "Rust in Peace" era, and that seemed like the right song to do. When we wrote that album (Rust...) there were a lot of dangerous moments - a lot of drugs, a lot of violence, a lot of auditions by people. It was just a very unpredictable period of time.

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