FHM Hero: Slash

FHM Hero: Slash. Real name: Saul Hudson. Age: 46. From: Beverly Hills via Stoke-On-Trent. Profession: Guitarist. Sold over 100 million albums. Overdosed 12 times. Owned 90 snakes. Played 194 gigs in a 28-month world tour. Died for 20 minutes. Given six weeks to live in 2001. Played the best riff of all time. Not a knob like Axl Rose.

For a man who once died, Slash is the coolest man alive. For an hour he’s been prowling round our photo studio in his trademark top hat and shades, twanging his Gibson Les Paul guitar in between shots. Awesome. But back to the bit about him ceasing to be alive. The incident took place in June 1992. Then, a 26-year-old Slash’s body said “No more”. No more smack. No more coke. No more booze. Which partially explains why the 46-year-old ex-Guns N’ Roses guitarist is looking a little bored. “This shoot would have been faster in the old days,” he chuckles, recalling the hazy, crazy, near-fatal ’90s. “I wouldn’t have been able to hang out that long. And I would’ve had a bottle of whiskey…”

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Slash, it’s important to state, is not unfriendly. He just doesn’t care about people taking black-and-white photos of him and asking him if he’d like a cup of tea. But you wouldn’t either if you’d filled stadiums from San Francisco to Shanghai, sold 100 million albums, overdosed 12 times and died once.

These days, Slash’s lifestyle is as clean as a surgeon’s pre-op scalpel. He doesn’t even smoke, just constantly sips and refills his glass of water. Having been sober for seven years, he’s like the wise old man of rock’n’roll hedonism. Compare his physical appearance with the 1,000 times more disintegrated Ozzy Osbourne or Steven Tyler and he looks like he lives on a health farm. Tanned skin. Muscular arms. Hair as luscious as a poodle at Crufts. His look is so ridiculously iconic you can actually buy Slash fancy dress costumes.

He looks like a perfect mould for other rock stars to be based on and, apart from some lines on his face and gnarly bits on his hands, he looks pretty much the same as he did when Guns N’ Roses’ debut album, Appetite For Destruction, came out in 1987. On one of his fingers is a ring in the shape of a guitar. “I’ve got loads,” he shrugs.

The White Isle

When he’s done posing, Slash sits on a sofa, still dressed all in black and still wearing his top hat like it’s no big deal, but this time he teams it with a sleeveless T-shirt he bought at French overlord of cheesy house music David Guetta’s F*** Me I’m Famous night at Pacha in Ibiza. Yeah, you heard right. Slash – the man whose hands crafted some of the greatest guitar solos of all time in Sweet Child O’ Mine, Paradise City and November Rain – hangs out on The White Isle. “I spent a lot of time there last summer,” says the Stoke-born, Los Angeles-raised maestro. “And had my 10th anniversary wedding renewal there, so we were there for about a month. David Guetta kinda plays there a lot, so I’ve seen him many times because my wife [Perla Ferrar, whom he married in 2001] loves that shit.

“Personally, I’m hard-pressed to find anything redeeming about it, but since she loves it so much I’m around it all the time. I drink water, sit around, stay up until 10, 11am and watch everyone fucking fall about themselves.” Fortunately, he doesn’t wear his top hat out. That’d be waaaay too freaky.

Slash does, however, wear his shades out. He wears them all the time, which is a shame because his eyes have seen a lot of action. After releasing the albums Appetite For Destruction, GN’R Lies (1988), Use Your Illusion I & II (1991) and The Spaghetti Incident? (1993), Guns N’ Roses were superstars – but it cost ’em. Slash and his former BFF Axl Rose haven’t spoken to each other since Slash quit the band on July 17, 1993. Axl’s behaviour was often questionable, doing stuff like assaulting a security guard at a 1987 show in Atlanta, starting riots at two 1988 New York gigs, attacking a man in the crowd in 1991 in Missouri for recording a show, then walking off stage and sparking a riot which injured 60 fans. Compared to Rose, Slash was a loveable rogue with cool hair who loved getting fucked up. If you’d been school friends with Slash and Axl and taken them home to meet your parents, your mum would’ve kicked Rose out for being a grubby fucker, then given Slash a cup of tea and washed his hypodermic needle for him before lending him money to go and get more fucked up. That was his ‘thing’. It was charming.

Hippy parents

“I was born into the ’60s revolution thing,” he says, sipping his water. “And my parents were entrenched in the hippy movement. I was always around people seeking out a ‘higher being’ or something. It was fun. I was doing it from an early age. It was a constant pastime, especially drinking. Boozing was easy. I wasn’t necessarily trying to be cool. I didn’t think it was cool to be fucked up. When I was growing up the bands I listened to were all fucked up. But I didn’t know Keith Richards [from The Rolling Stones] was a junkie. I didn’t know about the guys who were in Led Zeppelin. I never thought, ‘I have to be like that.’

“And besides, I liked to consider myself a productive and functional alcoholic drug addict. My philosophy was that you could spend the night before shooting up into the veins in your eyeballs as long as you could get to wherever you had to be the next day.”

The only physical leftover from the chemical years is a defibrillator in his heart, which a doctor fitted in 2001 when Slash was given six days to live. It gives him an electric shock if his heart ever starts beating too fast or slow. It’s gone off less than ten times. Mainly because: “One of the things we didn’t take into account is that when I go onstage my heart goes up in tempo way beyond normal. I had some shows with Michael Jackson [in 2006] and it went off four or five times. It’s got the impact of being hit with a baseball bat.”

It also went off once when Slash dipped back into his old ways. “I was back on the brown, in Velvet Revolver,” he recalls. “I remember passing out in the kitchen and feeling this sort of thud. It was the defibrillator kicking in.”

Snakes not ladders

As well as the hard stuff, Slash’s also into weird stuff, including: snakes (“I only have one now, I used to have 90, but I’m on the board of the Greater Los Angeles Zoo Association”); pinball machines (“I have three in the house and a few more in storage, The Addams Family pinball machine is hands down the best ever made”); Angry Birds (“I got a fucking iPad for Christmas and got addicted to that game on the road, but I kicked it”); and racing cars (“I went through a period”).

Slash went through a lot of periods. But ultimately – behind the drugs, the weirdness, the groupies, the hair, the never-ending ‘will they, won’t they?’ bullshit surrounding whether or not the original line-up of Guns N’ Roses will get back together – he is just a fucking amazing guitar player. Always has been, always will be, and since taking his magic fingers away from GN’R he’s brought his immense talents to Slash’s Snakepit (selling shed loads of 1995’s It’s Five O’Clock Somewhere and 2000’s Ain’t Life Grand) and Velvet Revolver (who went to number one in the US with Contraband in 2004, then number five with Libertad in 2007).

Now he just does his thing solo, and dropped the self-titled album Slash in 2010, which had Ozzy Osbourne, Fergie from The Black Eyed Peas, Dave Grohl, Lemmy and Iggy Pop on it. This month he’s releasing Apocalyptic Love, recorded with Myles Kennedy and The Conspirators. He’s “pretty much over” the idea of wanting to be in the biggest band in the world, he says, because “that was one facet to a myriad of problems I had”. Fair enough, so why on earth does he risk a relapse by putting together albums and taking his bad self on tour? He thinks for a second, takes a final sip of water, smiles and says: “Because I’m crazy.”

Slash myths debunked

David Bowie was Slash’s dad for a bit. “My mum went out with him for a while. I was about 10 or 11. I haven’t seen him in a while, but I remember he came to a Guns N’ Roses show with my mum, which was an interesting evening. I’ve talked to him a few times over the years, but he wasn’t my dad.”

A vodka brand called Black Death recruited him as their ambassador. “They approached me about being their mascot or whatever the fuck. Which was fine with me because they gave me lots of vodka. It was great, and when you bought some it came in a little coffin. Unfortunately, they went out of business.”

FYI

• Slash once designed a Guns N’ Roses pinball machine – the loudest ever made, featuring 18 GN’R songs. “I met some players who were so good it was mind-numbing,” he says.
• In 2004, Total Guitar magazine voted the riff in Sweet Child O’ Mine the best ever. In 2009, Time magazine voted Slash the second best guitar player in the world, ever.
• Axl Rose is the only remaining original member of Guns N’ Roses. They released the album Chinese Democracy in 2008. It was rubbish.

Slash’s new album Apocalyptic Love is out on May 22 on Roadrunner Records. Photography by Steve Schofield.

From the June 2012 issue of FHM India.