Megadeth have laid out where the farewell goes next. "Anthrax and Kerry King are going out with us on the next run," Dave Mustaine told Eddie Trunk on SiriusXM, "after that, we're going out with Black Label Society and Testament in Europe."
Before either of those there is a southern hemisphere run. The band leave for New Zealand in a couple of weeks, two nights at Spark Arena in Auckland on 7 and 8 November, then Australia, then Korea, which Mustaine says they have not played in almost twenty years. India is being looked at and South Africa is in discussion, a territory he says he has never been to and wants.
That is a lot of touring for a band that is ending, and the reason it is being announced piece by piece is the one he was asked about directly. Mustaine has Dupuytren's contracture, which pulls the fingers towards the palm, and he will not name a final show. "I think that that would be a very sad way to end things," he said. "I would rather that we just keep going and doing until, once the shows start to suffer, I'm gonna know, and right now they're not."
He added that he has been working with vocal instructors and that the shows are getting better, and that the decision between stopping and having the hand operated on comes when that stops being true. His memoir went into the New York Times list this week, which is the other half of the same year.