Slash: In For A Penny

"I live out of a suitcase in my own house. I go home from tour, leave the fucking suitcase in the closet and I live out of it until it's empty. It drives the Mrs out of her mind, makes her think I'm packing up to leave any minute. That kind of mentality dies hard."

For a rock n' roller who has always walked what he has talked, Slash - the iconic guitar virtuoso - once made mention of how he had found his personal life intertwined with the hurricane that was Guns n' Roses at the time. Speaking to The Skinny from a Chicago hotel room now, he admits that there's no other way to live his life but for whichever band he's part of.

"That's a character defect, that's permanent. I don't know how to explain it. I'm one of those guys that you'll meet in a band occasionally that lives and breathes his band and music and guitar playing 24-7, so that's what my poor wife is married to. It's not even so much that I'm obsessed; it's 100% of my make-up - without that I cease to be. I guess that was the problem with Guns n' Roses; in those days that meant some pretty fucking heavy partying as well. But because I've been there and done that, with Velvet (Revolver) it's primarily about music. It's impossible for me to separate from that at all; I've learned to work with it."

Ah, yes, "some pretty fucking heavy partying." The days of Gn'R, let's get this out of the way first. Your tongue, is it black then? Forgive us a second, but you're often to be found head tilted toward the fretboard, behatted, fag dangling; you're not afforded a great deal of microphone time to clear up any half truths.

"I think… well, it used to have a black stripe down the middle from a combination of grain alcohol and cigarettes, that's true," he sounds uncertain, as though there have been so many myths that he sometimes can't be sure what was real to begin with.

Sweet Child O' Mine, were you just "pissing about" when you wrote that riff?

"It was almost like a self indulgent little trick that I'd come up with, this little melody that was not to be taken too seriously but it turned into this very serious song. I have to admit that once it became a song that was part of our repertoire, I'd get drunk on occasion and I couldn't play that fucking thing."

And the Chinese Democracy, reckon it's even real?

"That's actually out of my… I want to tell you yeah, and I'm pretty sure it does but I don't even want to talk about Chinese Democracy because it always comes up and bites me in the ass."

There's little doubt that Slash is wise to the tricks of the media; unafraid to broach most subjects but, probably since everything Guns-related has become such a minefield of fragile egos, folklore and legalities, he steps off the peddle at the nearest whiff. Though, resolutely refusing to rest on his laurels with any contentment in the knowledge that he devised one of the riffs that, all hyperbole intended, almost singularly came to define the modern rock n' roll age, Slash keeps the show rolling with Velvet Revolver. Rounded out by fellow former Gunners Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, as well as former STP badboy Scott Weiland and ex-Wasted Youth guitarist Dave Kushner, fads and fashions have come and gone but the LA rockers' main objective, to simply bring it to their legion, remains abundantly clear.

"I've never really looked at music as being compared to sports, where you only have this window and then retire. Music is something where, if you've started out a career then there's no turning back. I would expect a lot of bands to do their damndest to stay together."

Weathering a hellish storm since they came together to commemorate the life of Ozzy associate and good friend Randy Castillo in 2002, odds and obstacles have been stacked against VR from the kick off. Having identified a void where the old spirit of rock n' roll once sat so prominently, the band immediately encountered a new potential medium that they ultimately chose not to embrace during their pursuit to re-establish themselves post-Guns. "I tried to do a documentary on how the band was coming together with VH1," sighs Slash, "and they turned that into what looked like a reality show. It's like a format that everybody has conformed to, you turn the TV on and there's all this self exposure shit going on. I don't like being part of it at all… I find it intrusive and I find it embarrassing for the people I see doing it."

From the way he describes it, conceptualising their second album was initially furthest from his own mind albeit foremost in Weiland's, though the results naturally fell into being something of a compromise.

"The one thing that we did find in this record is a unified direction. It's freedom of expression, speech and thought, not to be nailed down to any particular parameters, especially because we had such a hard time from a lot of different outlets as far as people trying to break this band down goes. There is a theme to that, but as far as a concept record goes, people do concept records and sometimes they're ok and sometimes they're shite… I've never bought a concept record, with the exception of Tommy."

The unified direction is that of Libertad, a name which strangely fell upon the band twice for it to stick, says Slash. "About a year ago there was this t-shirt Duff was wearing that Scott saw and thought would make a great title, but we weren't really sure how the direction of the title was going to go at the time. But, almost like an act of fate, I picked up this Chilean coin that had this design - that I thought would be cool artwork for the cover - and it had the word Libertad on it. It stuck throughout the making of the record and it came to have more significance as we started finishing since all the songs are about, in some shape or form, freedom and that kind of vibe."

As VR wound up recording sessions, however, tragedy struck when both Matt and Scott lost their brothers to addiction. Suddenly, the mood over the phone becomes uncomfortably sombre. "To have something as horrific as that happen and for those guys to be able to turn around and still be focused enough to finish the record was just a huge feat," Slash marvels. "We've been through a lot."

Seemingly more focused in the aftermath of their tribulations, and as a guy who lives and breathes his band, Slash's goals for the future remain simple. "It's funny, because the mentality of being in a garage band from the time you were 16 or 17 never really changes. Right now it's about packing up, leaving Chicago and playing a great gig in Detroit, that's about as far as I can really see." And his promise to Glasgow is simple: "The band will be present in all its fucked up glory."