“I WANT TO STICK TO WHAT EXCITES ME RATHER THAN CONFORM TO WHAT’S POPULAR AT THE MOMENT. I’D RATHER KEEP IT ROCK ’N’ ROLL.”
“I’d be lying if I said I don’t feel the pressure in this age of technical expression and fluidity...”
He was just 21 when Guns N’ Roses’ debut album Appetite For Destruction was released - the record that made him famous as a guitar hero. And all these years later, as Slash speaks to TG via a Zoom call from his home in LA, it’s evident that his love of rock ’n’ roll is as strong as it’s ever been.
When he talks about 4, the new album from Slash featuring Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators, he’s thrilled about how it turned out, with an energy created from having the whole group playing together in the studio. “Recording live is something I’ve always wanted to do,” he says. And when he talks about how things are working out in Guns N’ Roses – seven years since he and bassist Duff McKagan reconciled with singer Axl Rose and rejoined the band – he says he couldn’t be happier.
4 is also the first release on Gibson Records, a fitting honour for a player who has been synonymous with the Les Paul since Appetite For Destruction defined Guns N’ Roses as the greatest rock band of the late 80s.
In that era, when hard rock music was getting increasingly slick and safe, GN’R sounded genuinely dangerous. Slash’s lead playing had a grind that over-polished shredders couldn’t touch, but his melodic hooks in Sweet Child O’ Mine and Paradise City were irresistible. 35 years and 30 million sales later, it’s quite probably the greatest rock debut of all time.
After exiting from Guns N’ Roses in 1995, Slash found success second time around in the 2000s with the supergroup Velvet Revolver, co-starring Duff McKagan, ex-GN’R drummer
