From Ice-T to the Sex Pistols’ Steve Jones, Megadeth frontman Dave Mustaine isn’t averse to inviting outside musicians to appear on his band’s albums.
But there was one unlikely high-profile collaborator whose appearance on a classic Megadeth song fell apart at the very last minute.
In 1994, Megadeth were riding high on the success of albums such as Rust In Peace and Countdown To Extinction, the latter entering the Billboard charts at Number 2 – their highest ever chart position.
The band’s sixth album, Youthanasia, was their most commercial-sounding record yet, to the point where Dave Mustaine later complained that producer Max Norman pushed the band to slow down their songs to make them more palatable for radio.
“When you listen to those songs, they’re all really slow,” said Mustaine in 2024. “We’re a metal band, you can’t have everything at 120 BPM. It’s obvious that that’s a radio tempo.”
Despite his reservations, Youthanasia featured several classic tracks, including one that would be widely recognised as one of Megadeth’s greatest songs: A Tout Le Monde.
The version of A Tout Le Monde that appears on Youthanasia was sung by Mustaine alone, but the band would revisit it 13 years later with the intention of re-recording it as a duet.
The updated version of the song, retitled A Tout Le Monde (Set Me Free), appeared on 2007’s United Abominations album and featured Mustaine trading lines with Cristina Scabbia, singer with Italian goth metal band Lacuna Coil.
“That song was never respected by the record company [Capitol], or by anyone except myself and the fans,” Mustaine told Metal Hammer in 2007. “Being one of my most beautiful songs, I thought it deserved a better chance before I went into retirement.”
But Scabbia wasn’t the first person that Mustaine approached to appear on the new version of the song. The Megadeth man had considered two unnamed singers who failed to work out, before reaching out to a third: Lisa Marie Presley.
Presley, who died in 2023, was the daughter of rock’n’roll legend Elvis Presley and a singer in her own right. But sadly, the mooted team-up with Megadeth fell through at the eleventh hour.
“She was literally getting onto the plane,” Mustaine told Metal Hammer, adding cryptically: “I felt awkward about it, but I’ve got a bad enough reputation and so has she.”
In another interview with Straight.com, the Megadeth frontman explained: “We had to call and say, ‘Sorry, we changed our minds. I would have loved to have heard what Lisa Marie Presley would have done,.”
The exact reason for Presley’s non-appearance on A Tout Le Monde (Set Me Free) has never been revealed. Instead, Mustaine enlisted Cristina Scabbia as his duet partner on the song.
“Cristina is the best of all the female singers around at the moment and I hope it helps her band’s career,” Mustaine told Metal Hammer.
Fittingly, given the Megadeth singer’s issues with Youthanasia’s radio-friendly approach, the new version of the song was faster than the original. As for what it would have sounded like with Lisa Marie Presley? We can only imagine.