TESTAMENT‘s Alex Skolnick has revealed that he was “on standby” for MEGADETH in 2016 when the latter band’s then-guitarist Kiko Loureiro and his wife were expecting twins. The guitar virtuoso made the revelation while chatting to Eonmusic about METAL ALLEGIANCE‘s upcoming show at the House Of Blues in Anaheim, California.

One of the elite breed of guitar shredders from the 1980s, Skolnick was famously a student of Joe Satriani, along with Steve Vai and METALLICA‘s Kirk Hammett, and was even sought out by Ozzy Osbourne, playing a gig with the BLACK SABBATH legend in the U.K. in 1995.

When Eonmusic‘s Eamon O’Neill put it to Skolnick that he would have been a perfect fit for the MEGADETH, Alex admitted that he had been on the radar of band leader Dave Mustaine for some time. Skolnick said: “I heard through the grapevine, many, many years ago [that they were interested]. I don’t know, if I’d made a call secretly, and reached out to management, or whatever, and said, ‘Hey, I really wanna give this a shot,’ I’m sure maybe it could have happened, but it was pre-Marty [Friedman, who joined MEGADETH in 1990], and it was during the time TESTAMENT was just up and running, and I knew, ‘Okay, if I were to join this other thing…’ At that time with TESTAMENT, we were really finding our footing, and establishing a sound with albums like ‘The New Order’ and ‘Practice What You Preach’, like now-essential albums, and it just seemed like, ‘Okay, I’m a part of this thing.’ And I think at that point MEGADETH had already had three guitar players, and there’d been so many members, so it was just clear, ”Okay, if you’re in MEGADETH, you don’t know how long it’s going to last.'”

It was then that Alex revealed that he had been approached to possibly play for MEGADETH less than a decade ago, on reserve for Loureiro whose wife was pregnant at the time. “There were a couple shows, actually, as recently as the Kiko Loureiro era, where I was on standby to fill in,” he said. “Kiko‘s wife was giving birth, so there was a possibility of that, and they didn’t know exactly when it was going to be, and there was a possibility it was going to conflict with a show or event. So it was on standby. I learned the songs. I was ready, but as it turned out, he didn’t need to miss any shows. I’ve always been friends with the MEGADETH camp, you know, mad respect for the band, but I like my role as… occasional possible understudy is as far as it’s gone.”

Read the entire interview at Eonmusic, where Alex discusses the METAL ALLEGIANCE show, how his commercial ambitions were misunderstood, and how he came to rejoin TESTAMENT in 2006.