Slash Interview

Once the epitome of the hard-living heavy metal superstar, former Guns N' Roses guitarist Slash has released a solo album, Roadrunner, and is now a tee-total non-smoker, who also happens to be English.

By Craig McClean

Slash Photo: DAN BURN-FORTI

The Royal Variety Performance, Cardiff Nov 2005. Queen Elizabeth II, Cliff Richard, Ozzy Osbourne and Slash. Photo: REX

Slash of 'Guns and Roses' and Michael Jackson performing onstage at the 1995 Video Music Awards in Los Angeles, CA on September 7, 1995. Photo: GETTY

Slash, the erstwhile Guns N’ Roses guitarist and the most rock ’n’ roll dude in Los Angeles, strides into the Sunset Marquis hotel and past the foyer’s Whiskey Bar – where he first met his wife, his friend and fellow English transplant Robbie Williams, and, no doubt, many others – and up to a first-floor room.

He’s ostensibly here to discuss his robustly tuneful debut solo album, which debuted at number three on the US charts (just behind the teenage heartthrob Justin Bieber, of all people) and which features vocals from Ozzy Osbourne, Iggy Pop, Lemmy, Alice Cooper – the kind of cockroach-like hard rock survivors that we’d expect to work with Slash – as well as Fergie of the Black Eyed Peas. But then Slash’s extravagant talents on the guitar have previously seen him work with everyone from Michael Jackson to Rihanna. In matters musical and recreational, he’s a rather catholic chap.

Slash is one of the most iconic and familiar figures in rock. Sunglasses? Check. Rock T-shirt and dirty jeans? Check. But today he is not rocking a top hat; his fuzzy black afro bursts wild and free and explosively around his Mount Rushmore face. And there’s something else. He doesn’t have a cigarette dangling from his lips.

'I’ve been off them for a year,’ he says, gravelly, gravely as he settles into a sofa and stares down a bottle of mineral water.

What, I ask, was his motivation? 'Well, you know, the missus was bugging me about it,’ Slash says with a chuckle. Having been born in Stoke-on-Trent and possessed of a British passport – he and his parents moved to the United States when he was six – the man christened Saul Hudson is perhaps the only LA rocker qualified to use the word 'missus’. Anyway: 'the first time I quit smoking was because we’d just had a baby and she claimed the baby smelled like an ashtray. So I thought, well, I’ll give it a shot. So I quit for a year and then I started again.

'Then this time my mom died of lung cancer, and I got sick with pneumonia.

'And after I got sick I had a cigarette in my hand and a lighter and I was about to smoke – and it just seemed really stubborn of me.’

Ola Hudson was a high-end music industry costume designer. She clothed Diana Ross, George Harrison, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. After she and Slash’s father – Anthony Hudson, a graphic designer who worked on album sleeves for Neil Young and Joni Mitchell – divorced when Slash was eight, she dated, among others, David Bowie. It’s through Bowie that Slash knew Iggy Pop when he was a boy. His mother was also a life‑long smoker.

'One of the regular statements that my mom made all my life was: “I’m gonna quit one of these days.” And she never did. But it was actually a shock ’cause she was in great health. And she went to the doctor about a bruise that she had from bumping into something and somehow they diagnosed her with cancer,’ he says sanguinely. 'It was the weirdest thing.’

As for her son, 'I just always smoked. A lot of vices that I’ve had over the years were always to make up for some sort of character deficiency, one of them being shyness. So I used to drink a lot, or do drugs. It’s not been too difficult to give up smoking, apart from the fact that I’ve found that I use Twitter all the time to keep my hands busy!’

And what of his fondness for Jack Daniel’s, liquor of choice for heavy metal bacchanals? It seems Slash hasn’t had a drink for four years.

'I quit doing drugs. But ’cause I’m a habitual kinda guy, if I quit doing drugs, then I drink. And then if I quit drinking, I do drugs – forever. So I quit doing drugs this one time, and I decided not to drink too. It’s been four years. And I really don’t miss it.’

Of all the things Slash has given up, what has been the most difficult? It’s certainly not Guns N’ Roses. He joined the nascent line-up, fronted by singer Axl Rose, in his late teens in 1985. Together they enjoyed 11 years of raging success. GN’R’s first album, 1987’s Appetite For Destruction, sold 28 million copies, propelled by the deathless rock anthem Sweet Child O’ Mine, which itself was propelled by Slash’s signature guitar riff. The band went on to gargantuan stadium-sized success, selling more than 100 million albums, and Slash became one of the greatest guitarists of his generation.

Last year he came second in Time magazine’s ranking of all-time electric guitar heroes (Jimi Hendrix came first).

But success went to Rose’s head, and to Slash’s veins. The singer developed a messiah complex, and the guitarist cultivated a full-blown heroin addiction. Rose ended up the sole original member of the band; in 2008 he finally managed to release Chinese Democracy, Guns N’ Roses’ sixth studio album. It took him more than a decade to make and cost a figure reportedly somewhere north of $13 million, which would make it the most expensive album in the history of time.

Post GN’R, Slash formed Velvet Revolver with bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Matt Sorum (also GN’R alums), in which the bad behaviour continued.

In his outrageously entertaining and candid 2007 biography, he depicts a life of rampant sex with groupies, coke for breakfast, guns for kicks, snakes for pets and the chaos that ensues when LA wild boys start earning millions upon millions of dollars.

You might call it picaresque, if the tales of shooting up coke/heroin speedballs and psychotic behaviour weren’t so alarming. At one point Slash’s conviction that there were little men following him everywhere - cavorting up his arm - even spooked his drug dealer. Slash writes of his dealer’s response: 'You’d better go, man. You’re way too out there. You should go home.’ 'Apparently,’ Slash noted wryly, 'I was bad for business.’

Slash is a coolly honest and relaxed chap. He is robust, and alert, and self-deprecating. Maybe it’s his English genes but – sunglasses indoors notwithstanding – there is no LA swagger about him. He’s cuddly, almost, and hugely entertaining company, with none of the post-rehab piousness that can attend former addicts. Looking back, was he never frightened by the depths of depravity to which he sank? Seeing little men dancing on his curtains – was that food for thought?

'No!’ he laughs. 'See, that’s what was wrong with me. I loved all that s---.

'Oh yeah! The near heart attacks, all the hallucinating, and the whole f------ thrill of chasing my dealers down – everything that was wrong about doing drugs I liked about it.’ Because you were a thrill-seeker, and a lonely man to boot?

'I think you just summed it up right there – lonely thrill-seeker! But you know, I have no regrets about my drug stuff. People always go: “Oh, now you’re a role model for going straight.” I say: “I’m not a role model, I just got sick of it.”’

Slash initially met his second wife Perla at a Guns N’ Roses concert afterparty in Las Vegas.

'We had our little fling for a second. I knew that I was seriously attracted to her. And I didn’t need that in my life, so we stayed apart.’ They remained friends, but then one night in 1997 they met again in the Sunset Marquis’s Whiskey Bar and have been together ever since. The love of a good woman didn’t exactly make Slash settle down, though.

'She and I were hard-core partiers for a long time. When we walked into a room you knew there was trouble. She was more hard-core than I was!”

Really?

'Yeah! And also, more – what’s the word for it? – more outspoken. A tougher all-round person. I’m sort of quiet. I don’t want to draw attention to myself if I can help it,’ he offers. 'She, on the other hand, started trouble. So between the two of us, Sid and Nancy had nothing on us. We weren’t necessarily that stupid though. Although we did have a couple of rows that were, you know, serious. Cops coming and s---.’ You were the injured party? 'There was one time when we both were. Anyway,’ he says brightly, 'we’ve had an interesting existence. Then at some point somehow we both just mellowed out a little bit. We’re still a pretty rockin’ couple though, I gotta say.’

Slash, Perla and their rockin’ sons London, seven, and Cash, five, live at the top of a pricey hill in Hollywood. Their neighbour is Robbie Williams, coincidentally another Stoke boy made good. Now sober Slash and sober Robbie have regular poker sessions together. 'He’s a good poker player,’ Slash says approvingly. One night all Williams’s 'Stoke buddies’ were in town, so Slash had his father come over too. 'It was a room full of Stoke guys talking about football.’ His father, he says, still has his Potteries accent. 'I do consider myself British. I have very strong feelings about my British heritage. My first years were there, I went to school there, and I have seemingly endless family on that side of the pond. So I’ve always felt most comfortable in England.’

Slash doesn’t do regret, nor rancour. He calmly refuses to be drawn on the (de)merits of Chinese Democracy – 'you know I’m not gonna give you the answer you want for that!’ He seems more tickled than anything by reports that Axl Rose has banned from Guns N’ Roses concerts anyone wearing Slash T‑shirts. 'I don’t know if that’s really true. I like to give the benefit of the doubt. But some people swear it’s true.’ He’s not even bothered by Axl Rose reportedly calling him 'a cancer’.

'You know,’ he chuckles, 'that’s sorta funny. The fact that he would go and say that – I started thinking about it: I’m around a lot so to him I probably am a cancer. And now the record’s doing really well, I’m even more cancerous! And apparently we’re gonna be touring Europe at the same time, which will put even more emphasis on the cancer thing!’

Slash says you’d have to be 'out of your head’ to want a career in music, yet he wouldn’t have had it any other way. Not least because, for the man once given six days to live if he didn’t quit drinking, music saved his life. 'On my own I’m very self destructive,’ he admits. 'The only thing that saved me was music - my desire to play.’

• 'Slash’ (Roadrunner) is out now. He plays today at the Download Festival, and Glastonbury Festival on June 27