Dave Mustaine has firmly shut down any talk of his former friend and bandmate David Ellefson ever rejoining Megadeth.
Addressing that possibility while filming a message for video sharing platform Cameo, Mustaine said, “Any chance on Ellefson coming back later on? The answer to that is no.”
Megadeth announced that they would be parting company with band co-founder Ellefson back in May. This decision came after sexually explicit videos featuring the bassist, filmed and shared without his consent, surfaced online. Ellefson is currently seeking to press ‘revenge porn’ charges against the individual who alleged illegally uploaded the videos in question.
Announcing Ellefson’s removal from the group in May, Megadeth declared: “We do not take this decision lightly. While we do not know every detail of what occurred, with an already strained relationship, what has already been revealed now is enough to make working together impossible moving forward.”
Ellefson had tracked his bass parts for Megadeth’s upcoming sixteenth album in Nashville, one year earlier. Mustaine has since declared that all Ellefson’s contributions to the album will be erased and re-recorded by a new new bassist.
Back in 2010, when Mustaine invited Ellefson to rejoin Megadeth after a previous falling out, he spoke of the importance of forgiveness, as a Christian.
“I'm a born-again Christian - I got saved in 2002 - and part of me getting saved was that I had a lot of stuff that I'd done in my career and my life that wasn't really great stuff, ” he told Revolver TV at the time. “And one of the things that I realised was that I had been forgiven for a lot of this stuff. And with that, if I had been forgiven, I need to forgive, too. So I met with Dave, we were Arizona, we were talking, and the next thing I know, we talked about the lawsuit [which Ellefson filed against Mustaine six years earlier, alleging, among other things, that he’d been subjected to emotional distress’] and I said, ‘I forgive you’, and he said, ‘I'm sorry’ and that was all that needed to be said. He's my best friend; I love him.”
No date has yet been announced for the release of the follow-up to 2016’s Dystopia.
