Slash

No kidding. Slash may be the busiest man in showbiz, with a new solo record and the Guns N’ Roses reunion under his belt this year – plus film productions on the horizon, global tours…

Few people have been as omnipresent in 2018 as Slash. If the blockbusting success of the reconstituted Guns N’ Roses’ ongoing Not In This Lifetime tour – current takings: $480 million and counting – wasn’t enough, he also pulled double-duty with Living The Dream, his third collaboration with Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators (his fourth solo LP overall). Despite that impressive workload, the man in the top hat is his usual supernaturally laidback self when it comes to casting an eye over the last 12 months.

How has 2018 been for you, Slash?

God, it’s been a great year. It’s been very busy, but busy in a very productive way. The year started out doing Guns N’ Roses stuff, then I started getting the Conspirators record together. Those two things have been the major focus of 2018.

That’s two pretty big things. Have you managed to have a holiday? I haven’t had any time off, no. Tomorrow we go back on the road for the final leg of the Not In This Lifetime Tour and then next year I start back up with the Conspirators again. Outside of this conversation, this is the first day off I’ve had in a little while.

Sorry to disrupt your day off, then. If you had to boil it down to one moment, what’s been the high point of 2018?

Fuck, that’s a hard one. You know, I have to say Guns N’ Roses headlining Donington. There’s been a lot of high points on this whole Guns thing, but that was like coming full circle. We played 30 years ago, fourth or fifth down from the headliner. It was a massive gig with major ups and downs, ‘cos of the kids that got trampled [two fans were crushed when the crowd surged towards the stage during GN’R’s set]. That was just a huge high point and a huge low point all within 24 hours. To come back as a headliner there after everything we’ve gone through up until we got back together was a massive deal. I had a bunch of my family there. It was really cool.

The Guns N’ Roses reunion was always going to be successful. But did you ever anticipate just how successful it would be?

It depends on what you’re talking about when you say success. I never really thought about what Guns N’ Roses would be like as far as dollars and cents and that kind of thing went, so the success of it on that level was, ‘Okay, that’s pretty awesome.’

The real success of it was to get back in a room together after so much time apart. That black cloud of animosity that had perpetuated through the entire time that we were apart… to get past all that and get in a room together and play and have that magic instantaneously come back, and to realise that the reason that the band was ever considered great by anybody was the fact that there was actually a genuine chemistry that made some good fucking music was the success. And then to go out and play and to be so well received by so many people across the globe, that was a major thing that I will never, ever take for granted.

People still talk about rock being dead, but the success of the Not In This Lifetime tour – as well as the rise of Greta Van Fleet – shows there’s life in the old dog yet…

Well, I’m so in the trenches as far as rock’n’roll is concerned, it’s never really died for me. There’s always an audience for music that comes from the heart and is done sincerely and it’s done with a passion, for that.

But I do think it’s so diluted on a commercial level. It’s the same with any genre – you milk it for every last fucking penny and everybody’s jumping onto the bandwagon to try and get a piece of that, the whole reason for doing it gets lost. People pick up on it. They don’t know why, they don’t think about it but they can feel when there’s no spirit and it’s just not interesting any more. Rock’n’roll is built on all the fucking combustible human emotions coming to a head and letting it out there and expressing it, and people relate to that. I think that gets lost in translation in this industry.

Let’s talk movies. It’s been the year of the horror remake – Suspiria, the new Halloween. As a horror buff, is that a good thing, or should those films have been left as they were?

I haven’t seen the new Suspiria yet but I hear it’s really good. It’s not necessarily like the original, or trying to be Dario Argento’s version of it – but in its own right it’s supposed to be really cool. Halloween was a sequel to the original, 40 years later. I went and saw it, it was okay. Like, ‘Whatever…’ It was good for diehard Halloween fans. I can’t say that remakes are bad things, but too many tend to be kind of, ‘Come on…’ I think I’m just glad to see horror movies being the big thing right now.

Not the slasher kind, but the real story-driven horror movies are seeming to make a comeback, which is nice.

“The real success of the Guns reunion was to get back in a room together after so much time apart.”

If they could remake one old horror movie, which one would it be?

I’d rather see a great new, original story than to see anything remade. If the movie was really great when it first came out, it doesn’t really need to be remade. I was toying around with the idea of bringing Death Train back, because it was a movie with a great concept but I don’t think it was fully realised in the original version.

I guess if people aren’t even aware that it’s a remake, but somebody was inspired enough to make a better version than the original, it could be cool, maybe. But I’d personally rather see a really good original story.