SLASH

After all this time, getting on for a seemingly unlikely 35 years, Slash still can’t quite believe what happened.

“I thought the band was fucking great,” he says of Guns N’ Roses. “It would have been a band that I would have listened to had I not been in it. I would have had the T-shirt, right?” he says with a laugh. “But I saw it as being a cool cult band. I didn’t have any fantasies of it being anything super-huge. So none of us, I think, was prepared for what it turned into when it did. I thought it was a great band with a certain energy and a certain chemistry, but I didn’t know that one record would become what it became – that it would sort of transcend…”

When Guns N’ Roses’ debut album Appetite For Destruction was released on July 21, 1987, Slash, the cat in the top hat on lead guitar, was just two days shy of his twenty-second birthday. Two weeks after he turned 23, the album hit No.1 in the US. It would become the biggest-selling debut album of all time. It made Slash rich and famous, and defined him as the guitar hero of his generation.

All these years later, as he talks to Classic Rock via a Zoom call from his home in Los Angeles, he is in buoyant mood ahead of the release of the new album he has made with singer Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators. “We recorded everything live in five days,” he says enthusiastically. “I’ve always wanted to do a record like that.” He is also still buzzing from his latest tour with Guns N’ Roses. It’s now six years since he reconciled with singer Axl Rose and rejoined the band, along with bassist Duff McKagan, after an absence of 19 years. “All things considered,” he says, “it’s been fucking awesome.”

“[Growing up] I was a decent person. I just had problems with parents, teachers and policemen.”

Over the course of our hour-long conversation, Slash speaks openly about his life and his career, the good times and the bad. He’s always had a kind of unruffled cool about him, and after all the interviews he’s done – more than he could ever remember – there is nothing much that can faze him. He has a soft speaking voice and a sharp mind, his voice rising only when he laughs at one of the many absurdities that come with a life in rock’n’roll. There is only one subject that disturbs his easy flow, a subject he is reluctant to discuss – the new Guns N’ Roses album, currently a work in progress.