Slash says the Guns N’ Roses reunion began as fence-mending with Axl Rose, and that they have not argued once in ten years.
The phone call that ended one of rock’s longest feuds was not about putting Guns N’ Roses back together. Slash says nobody raised that idea at all.
The guitarist was in South America with Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators when his management passed on a message that Axl Rose‘s people wanted to make contact. He told the “Rolling Stone Uncut” podcast, recorded with editor-in-chief Neil Griffiths, that reforming the band was not on the table.
“You’re talking to somebody who had no inclination of rejoining the band, and there was nothing in the cards about that happening,” Slash said. “It just sort of happened out of the blue.”
By his account the approach was about repairing the relationship rather than booking shows. Once the tour finished, the two had dinner, and things moved from there.
Slash placed the original collapse less on Rose than on people around them.
“The actual issues between Axl and I weren’t insurmountable,” he continued. “It really had to do with other people that had gotten involved and exacerbated the issues that we had. Without them around, it was really easy for me and Axl to get past it — we haven’t had one f**king fight the whole 10 years we’ve been together this time around.”
He also described the years of public hostility as a waste, saying it had always disappointed him that things went the way they did, and that sitting down with Rose showed him the disputes had been superficial.
“Axl got in touch with me through management, and that wasn’t about Guns N’ Roses getting back together at the time — that was really about mending the fences. He and I had dinner, and everything just blossomed from there,” he added. “It was always a bummer to me that it went the way that it went… it was nice to get together with him and talk about it, and realise that all these issues were really on the surface and superficial and stupid.”
Slash left Guns N’ Roses in 1996 after a long deterioration over business decisions, creative direction and substance use, and both camps spent the following two decades trading statements through the press. He and Duff McKagan rejoined Rose in 2016 for the “Not In This Lifetime…” tour, which ran for four years and became one of the highest-grossing tours ever staged.
On new music, Slash sounded like a man tired of being asked.
“It’s gonna happen. I just don’t know when. It’s getting closer and closer — we were in the studio recently. It’s just a matter of when it happens,” he said.
He compared the process to the way the band eventually pulled Use Your Illusion I and II together in 1991 and 1992: “It was like that with the Use Your Illusion albums — nothing was going on, and then all of a sudden we just locked in and did it, and everything moves really quickly. That time is coming with Guns pretty soon, so it will happen.”
Some of that material is already public. The band issued “Nothin’” and “Atlas” last year, following the earlier standalone singles “Absurd“, “Hard Skool” and “Perhaps“. A full album would be their first since 2008’s Chinese Democracy, and the first with Slash since 1993’s The Spaghetti Incident?.
The current world tour finishes later this year with a stadium run through Australia and New Zealand, opening on November 29 in Adelaide and closing on December 17 in Auckland, taking in Townsville, Brisbane, Newcastle, Melbourne and Sydney along the way.
Slash has his own record waiting behind it. The fifth Slash Featuring Myles Kennedy & The Conspirators album is set for February 2027, with a tour to follow once Guns N’ Roses commitments clear.
