If the famous Glastonbury blues hits punters hard, imagine what it’s like for the bands. You ascend onto stage, rock out in front of 100,000 people (if you’re headlining), experience what it’s like to be a god, and then you just toddle off home afterwards. It must be quite the comedown.
When Guns N’ Roses’ guitar wizard Slash pops up on our Zoom call four days after an electrifying (if controversial) Worthy Farm set, he’s far from mopey though. He’s on fine form. He tells us about the new scary movie he’s produced and scored, The Breach, talks up his fave film composers and gushes excitedly about an old Hollywood pal, Patrick Wilson. In fact, so chatty is the top-hatted rock and roller that we end up running out of questions…
Hey Slash, did you have a good time at Glastonbury?
“It was fun – and massive! We had quite the experience. I’d played there once before with The Conspirators [Slash’s band with Myles Kennedy, in 2010], so I was sort of used to the vibe of the whole thing, but I didn’t really have any expectations. We just sort of just went and did it, you know?”
Tell us about asking Dave Grohl to come on stage for ‘Paradise City’
“We’ve actually jammed with Dave a couple of times. He’s just one of my all-time favourite musicians. I knew he was gonna be around, and I think it was [Guns N’ Roses bassist] Duff [McKagan] who said to him, ‘Hey, you wanna come jam?’ So yeah, it eventually came together and it was fun.”
Right, onto your new project – horror film The Breach – was it an easy soundtrack to write?
“Well, we did it during COVID, so it was a lot of long distance stuff. And I’m no scoring engineer. So I just wrote my bits and pieces and sent them in. Then [the sound department] transposed those into the instruments that we ended up using for the bulk of the film. Then I did some individual guitar and acoustic guitar bits that we put in there too.”
In the movie, some of the characters get infected by a virus that makes them grow extra fingers – would that be useful for playing guitar?
“I knew you were gonna say that! [laughs] That’s so funny. I honestly thought that would be a good joke when we were making the movie. You could get those extra riffs going, maybe some more harmonies happening…”
Are there any classic film composers that inspire you?
“Well, John Carpenter is great. I love Danny Elfman, he’s a genius. Hans Zimmer can be great too. John Williams and all these guys are super brilliant, but then there are some smaller names that maybe people only know for one movie. I mean people like [Icelandic musician] Hildur Guðnadóttir who did Joker – that was an amazing fucking score. I also think [Radiohead guitarist] Johnny Greenwood is a great fucking composer. There Will Be Blood was one of the best scores of the last 20 years.”
Have you ever met Johnny Greenwood?
“No! I’ve been to a couple of Radiohead shows but we’ve never been introduced.”
When did your love of horror start?
“Here! In England! When I was really, really little, living in Stoke-On-Trent, there were only two TV stations and they only played at certain times during the day. But there were the Hammer horror movies. People like Vincent Price, Peter Cushing and Charles Laughton – all those British horror icons. I just fell for it 100 per cent.”
Did your parents encourage your love of scary stuff?
“Yeah. My dad taught me to read before I even started going to school. He saw that I had an affinity for the horror genre and he had me reading H. P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury and Edgar Allan Poe.”
Was your mum into it too?
“Yeah, she’s American, so when I moved to the States [at the age of six] she turned me on to all the classics that I hadn’t seen like Dracula, King Kong, Frankenstein and The Wolfman. Then, when it came out [in 1973] I went to see The Exorcist.”
There’s a really cool mini doc about The Exorcist’s release where you can see people fainting from the stress – was it really like that?
“We actually saw it in a drive-through, but my mum and her girlfriend had me in the backseat. I just thought it was really entertaining. It didn’t scare me. I don’t scare very easily. That said, the first Night Of The Living Dead scared the shit out of me. It was so visceral, raw and fucking bleak. I found it quite unsettling.”
The last film that scared us was Insidious: The Red Door, which we saw this morning!
“Oh I know Patrick Wilson, I met him after the first Insidious. He came to a Guns N’ Roses show because he’s a fan. We met there and I sort of fanboyed out and managed to get his phone number and now I bug him all the time. I didn’t know there was a new one actually until I saw the ad in a trailer. I’m excited about it. How was it?”
Scary! But we mention the screening because we wanted to ask you what your ideal horror viewing setup is?
“Oh definitely in a theatre. It’s the most dramatic because of the sound and the size of the screen. I usually sit in the back. I don’t like to sit in the front, I think it takes everything out of proportion too much. And I like to watch with somebody who has the same taste in horror.”
Have you got any more horror projects in the pipeline?
“I’m on tour with Guns N’ Roses until October, then in January I go out with my other band The Conspirators. I don’t wanna divulge too much, but I’m also doing a really exciting TV series in England. It’s an adaptation of a great book. You’ll find out what it is when the press release comes out!”
One last thing before you go Slash, we interviewed the actress Denise Richards last year and she told us you helped her nephew through a bad time with drug addiction…
“Yeah, I did. I hope he’s doing OK. She lived across the street [in LA] and Charlie [Richards’ nephew] lived down the street. It was very communal. She was at her wits end with him – and I tried to see if I could help out. It’s sweet that she would remember that…”
‘The Breach’ is out on Digital Download from July 10
