Megadeth drummer Dirk Verbeuren marked his 10th anniversary in the band this month with a new interview with Brazil’s TV Braba, touching on everything from his stunned reaction to first being asked to fill in, to why he considers frontman Dave Mustaine the architect of thrash metal.
“[Laughs] I didn’t believe it. My first reaction, of course, was disbelief,” Verbeuren said (transcribed by Blabbermouth). “But initially I was just filling in — the plan was that I was gonna do about a month of shows. And then, in typical Dave Mustaine fashion, after a week or so of shows, Dave comes to me on the tour bus, and he goes, ‘So when are you telling the guys in Soilwork that you’re my drummer now?’ That was his way of saying, ‘I want you to play in the band.'”
“So, of course, it was a very exciting time, and kind of bittersweet at the same time, because I’d been with Soilwork for 12 years and they were good friends of mine, but everybody was, of course, like, ‘Of course you have to do this.’ And, yeah, so it was a very special experience. And to this day, it’s been now — actually, this month it’s gonna be 10 years since I played my first show in Megadeth, and it’s still surreal to this day.”
“You have to know that I went to see Megadeth live in 1990, so I was, like, 15 years old at the time. It was one of the first shows I ever saw — it was ‘Clash Of The Titans’ with Megadeth, Slayer, Testament, and Suicidal Tendencies in Europe, where I lived in France at the time. And now to be in the band for 10 years and to kind of continue the legacy with great music — everything Dave has done is iconic, but also the amazing drum work of [former Megadeth drummers] Nick Menza, Gar Samuelson, Chuck Behler, all the guys that have been in the band since then, it’s truly an honor. In metal music, you can’t really go much higher than that legacy. And to me, Dave is the guy who invented thrash metal. He wrote a lot of the iconic early stuff that kind of defined what that genre sounded like, and you can recognize his riffs among a million riffs. He has such a unique style of playing to this day on the guitar that, to me, Dave is the ultimate rock god. Absolutely.”
Asked which Megadeth songs are hardest to play, Verbeuren pointed to the debut era. “I would say that all the songs on Killing Is My Business… And Business Is Good! are quite difficult because not only are they played at breakneck speed, but Gar Samuelson, who was the band’s drummer at that time, had a very improvisational style, and so if you wanna replicate that, it’s quite difficult,” he said. Though he added: “People sometimes have the impression, like, ‘Oh, it must be so easy to play ‘Symphony Of Destruction’…’ No, they all have their own difficulties. When you play an hour-and-a-half set like we usually do, it’s truly a test of endurance and stamina.”
The full-circle Paris story is one Verbeuren keeps coming back to. “I saw Megadeth on the ‘Clash Of The Titans’ tour at Le Zénith in Paris,” he recalled. “And I have since now three times played with the band at that very venue. Every time I go there, it blows my mind because I’m, like, ‘I can’t believe I was here as a teenager seeing the band I’m now a part of.'”
On actually contributing music: in a September 2022 interview, Verbeuren revealed he brought riff ideas into the writing sessions for The Sick, The Dying… And The Dead! that Mustaine actively encouraged — resulting in the song “Life In Hell” being built from one of his demos, with a riff of his also landing in “Night Stalkers.” “I didn’t anticipate that any of my stuff would go anywhere, because, I mean, c’mon, this is Dave Mustaine we’re talking about,” Dirk said. “Who am I on guitar compared to Dave Mustaine?”
Megadeth‘s self-titled album — Verbeuren‘s second full-length with the band — was released in January via Mustaine‘s Tradecraft imprint on Frontiers Label Group‘s BLKIIBLK label. Prior to Verbeuren joining, former Lamb of God drummer Chris Adler had recorded the drums on 2016’s Dystopia.
