Dave Mustaine of Megadeth: bands who rely on pre-recorded tracks in live situations are “lazy”

Megadeth‘s Dave Mustaine spoke to Kerrang! Radio earlier this month, during Download Festival. One of the highlights of the interview is his harsh criticism of the overuse of backing tracks:

“I’ve always done the background singing on the records until, maybe about 10 years ago, we started having another person come in and help supplement the vocals because it’s just not my bag to be singing stuff that I’m not gonna sing live. I sing when I sing live on the records as much as I can.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using supplements for songs and other sounds and stuff like that if you can’t play them live. If you can play it live and you’re being fucking lazy and you’re seeing whatever just happened a couple of days ago with one of those big bands, and the singer… the tape started and the drummer wasn’t playing or something. You probably heard about that. I can’t remember who it was.

 We don’t have vocals that are canned. Usually what we have is a MIDI click track that runs all of our lights and switches all of our solos and stuff.”

The band he refers to is probably Kiss, who was recently caught using pre-recorded vocal tracks live.

You can watch Mustaine’s full interview here.