Slash interview- broadcast on 18th October 2012

 

Here it is, a full transcription of the interview we conducted with rock legend Slash!!

Slash Interview
Rory Nelson
Edinburgh Corn Exchange
7^th October 2012

 

Slash, this is your first date of the tour, up here In Edinburgh

 

Yeah, the first date of the UK tour.

You’ve played Scotland before, obviously

 

Yeah the last time we played was, I think, the year before last

I saw you in 2008 at the o2 Academy in Glasgow with Velvet Revolver…the night when Scott Weiland (Velvet Revolver vocalist) announced that was your last gig….did that take you by surprise?

No, because he was already out. We did the UK tour with Scott, but we’d already fired him. We did the whole tour and never spoke to him once and he flipped out that one night and said “This is our last show” and we just went “ha ha..yeah!”

Your new album Apocalyptic Love recently came out …we were listening to it on the way up in the car. It’s obvious you love playing with the guys (Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators)

Yeah, I mean, this is a situation where it’s been really gratifying for me, because everybody just wants to play! Its very simple, cos, you know…..for a long time there, I thought things just had to be complicated but it’s not necessary. So everybody now just gets on with what they have to get on with and it’s always good.

What’s your favourite track to play off the new album?

Ummm, it’s hard to say.  I get excited about playing all of them, you know, because it’s all new. But I love playing Halo, its short, it’s got this rhythm to it…its very in-your-face and simple. I like playing “No More Heroes” which is actually the most challenging song I think on the record. But yeah, it’s all good!

 

The intro to “Anastasia” is quite different to what people might expect from you….

 

That actually came out of a guitar solo that I was doing when we were here the last time. I have my solo “The Godfather” and I improvised and I kinda stumbled across this melody so I started to look forward to working on it during my guitar solo every night. By the time the tour was over, I had a pretty good structure for it which I made into the beginning of what is now “Anastasia”.

I have a recording of you, playing at the Albert Hall with BB King from 2011.  You’ve appeared on different people’s records over the years…is there anyone you’d really like to appear with, that you haven’t had the chance to yet?

Ummm…there’s a lot of people that I’ve never played with before that I think are great but I don’t get presumptuous and say “oh I’m gonna jam with this person, or that person”…it just happens when it happens, you know what I mean? So I just go with the flow …I get asked if I wanna play with someone, or I met someone in a pub or something and we start talking music.  Instead of just saying it, I actually follow through and that’s why I end up on so many records.  I don’t set these things up in advance, except for when I was doing my solo record, I had to call those people.

 

But the BB King thing was a real honour for me and I didn’t know that was coming.  They just called me and said “Would you like to play…” and I was on vacation. So I said “yeah, but I’m on a plane!”.

From the olden days, going back to “GnR Lies” (Guns N Roses album from 1988) …do you play any of those songs now? “Reckless Life”, “Move to the City” etc?

Uh, I haven’t played anything from “Lies”..apart from Patience . Other than that, I only play stuff that I had something to do with writing.

Your first solo album featured many artists…including some that you might not expect Slash to play with..Fergie from the Black Eyed Peas, Nicole Scherzinger…

Adam Levine? (laughs)

From that record, can you give us some idea what some of your favourites were?

Yeah that Adam Levine song (“Gotten”) was really cool.  The Fergie song is cool, Ozzy song is cool, Iggy Pop, Lemmy’s song …..I really like that record. I got to work with some really cool people.

The bonus track, “Paradise City” with Cypress Hill and Fergie…that’s one of my favourites…..

You know, that’s how Velvet Revolver got started..Matt (Sorum) , Duff (McKagan) and I jammed at the Key Club in Los Angeles with Cypress Hill, Steven Tyler (Aerosmith vocalist) and Buckcherry for Randy Castillo’s (famous rock drummer who died in 2002) fundraiser for his family after he died ….. …. I guess it was 2002. And that was when we did Paradise City, with Steve Tyler singing it and Duff called me up the next day and said “We should really do something with this”, and that was the very beginning of Velvet Revolver. 

So I always had it in the back of my head that I wanted to do a version of Paradise City with Cypress Hill..all those years later, I just threw it together, and Fergie was just in the studio so I got her to sing it.

So what can we expect from your show tonight?

 

Well, we’re gonna do a variation of the set…we have a pretty decent-sized set, probably about a two hour set and what we do is we alternate certain songs, and we change it every night.  So this particular set we’re gonna do is…uh..a pretty rockin’ set. But we just go out and wing it!  I think the urgency of just being spontaneous, as much as you can within a professional situation has kinda been lost in rock n roll…people are playing to tape now and its just like “Whoa”…its like people have forgotten what rock n roll is really based on and its gotten very “techno” over the last ten years.

Talking of technology, “Apocalyptic Love” sounds very organic…was it done live in the studio?

It was recorded live in the studio, direct to tape. That’s how the music was recorded, and we put the vocals on afterwards because the vocals are tricky, you have to pay more attention to the vocals.  But with the band, it was a really fun time, we did a lot of rehearsal, a lot of pre-production, sitting in the studio, rehearsing the songs, making sure we knew them. Then when we went in the studio, we did anything from 2 to 5 takes, and just picked the best ones.

 

So what’s next for Slash, Myles Kennedy and the Conspirators?

We’re gonna do this UK tour, then we have a tour of South America and then Eastern Europe in February next year and an Asia tour in May, so we’re starting to slow it down because we’ve been touring straight since April so Myles has to get back to Alter Bridge and so I’m gonna start working on material for another record. So when Alter Bridge is done, we’ll go in the studio, make another record, and we’ll do our run..so we’re gonna co-exist like that.

©Rory Nelson 2012