“[Civil War] was the first song where we went in the studio with Steven and realised that he wasn’t really playing up to par.” Slash on Steven Adler. Still, it worked, both on the ambitious Coma and the play-in-a-day arpeggios that kick off Civil War. “That was actually one of the first songs Axl and I wrote after Appetite,” Slash explains. “The tour wasn’t even finished, Axl heard me playing this acoustic thing and we started rehearsing it with the band in Australia. It was also the first song where we went in the studio with Steven and realised that he wasn’t really playing up to par.” Ah yes – Steven Adler. A childhood friend of Slash’s, the drummer had taken a similar slide into junkiedom, but with the crucial difference that he could neither kick the habit nor maintain his chops while under the influence. Civil War, a tempo-shifting number with a double-time crescendo, was the final nail in his coffin. “I did the demo tapes for Use Your Illusion,” Adler told this writer in an interview with Classic Rock last year. “We’d go in, play the songs, go to the listening booth and say together, ‘This is gonna be bigger than fuckin’ Appetite’. And it would have been. But because of my fuck up, we didn’t finish what we started.”

With Matt Sorum bumping Adler from the drumstool, GN’R’s last-gang-in-town image had its first hairline crack, but as a functioning band they were ready. The five men headed into A&M with producer Mike Clink to lay the foundations of the twin albums. “It was fucking great,” grins Slash. “I’d already spent time in pre-production on all that stuff, where we’d sorta play the song from one end to the other, so when we went in, I basically knew it. When I’m in the studio, I don’t want to fuck around. I want to move on. I don’t dwell on it too much. Before you know it, we were doing the basic tracks. We did 36 songs in 36 days.”

I the music was ambitious, the process of making it was relatively straightforward. “We did what we always did,” recalls the guitarist, “which was to go in the studio with the band in one room and just play the songs live, and that’s what goes on the record. But because I don’t like using headphones, I’d go in there and play along with the band just for the vibe and the energy, then I’d go back into the studio afterwards, get in the control room and do my guitar parts there.” Guitars, guitars, guitars. Working on the guitar and vocal overdubs respectively, Slash and Axl took over Studios A and B at the Record Plant, where the guitarist sank his royalties into a less destructive habit than girls or drugs.

“That was the first time I had enough money to buy some new guitars,” he says. “I was like a kid in a candy store, because there was so much material and I wanted all kinds of different guitar sounds, just whatever my vision was for that song. As tumultuous as it was to make those records, the one thing I really enjoyed was those three weeks doing guitars [and] just having a great time down at the Record Plant.” Was he consciously trying to depart from the Appetite tone? “Well, no,” he counters. “You have to digest the concept of recording almost three records’ worth of material! So it wasn’t about anything other than making 30-plus songs sound interesting.

“With a band like Guns N’ Roses when we first went into it, we had pretty much one direction. But when you have 30 different songs, different approaches, written at different times, you want to paint each song a certain colour. It called for a more intellectual approach.” Guitar hopping doesn’t seem very ‘Slash’, we tell him. He’s so associated with the Les Paul. “Yeah,” he agrees. “I went from using one guitar to… God knows how many on those albums, back to one guitar again now. It was fun at the time and it worked then, but it’s never worked for me since. I’ve found it’s very unsatisfying to use multiple guitars trying to make a record…

“Actually,” he continues, “when it came to Les Pauls on those records, I basically used my main one that I always play [a handmade Kris Derrig '59 replica with Seymour Duncan pickups]. “I didn’t use, like, 10 different models, because at the end of the day a Les Paul sounds like a Les Paul. But I also had a ‘58 Flying V, I was using Strats, a few different acoustics… Very specific guitars for different sounds. For You Could Be Mine, I think I used a BC Rich Mockingbird.”

All good fun, but if you squinted, there was trouble on the horizon. As Slash wrapped up his work and vacated the studio, Axl continued to polish his vocals and lay down those contentious synth parts (the horns in Live And Let Die and November Rain’s strings are all synth-generated). Before long, the process stagnated and tempers started to fray. In the mixing stages, Bob Clearmountain was fired for a covert plan to use sampled drums and Sex Pistols producer Bill Price was brought in, with Slash mailing daily samples out to Axl’s house in Malibu for his approval.

The obsession that would later define Chinese Democracy was already starting to warm up and so too was the level of alienation, with outside writers such as West Arkeen and Paul Huge complicating the royalty split. “The problem was with Izzy,” recalls Slash. “Because the album reached such gargantuan proportions as far as the production and complexity and the massive expectations [that] Izzy started to bow out. He was harder to find, because that was against his rock ‘n’ roll philosophy, which I totally agree with. “We got through the basic tracks and I think that’s what gave the albums such a natural feel. But when we started getting into the time it took to do overdubs and vocals, he sorta disappeared.”

Sure enough, just a week after the Use Your Illusion albums dropped, Izzy announced he would no longer tour with Guns N’ Roses, with his departure made official in November. His was the most significant name on a growing list of leavers; after Adler, manager Alan Niven had been fired earlier that year and Slash’s autobiography ruefully notes the appointment of Doug Goldstein as “one of the catalysts” for the band’s downfall. “When we started getting into overdubs and vocals, he sorta disappeared…” Slash on Izzy. To the bean counters at Geffen, everything was roses, with the Use Your Illusion albums storming to number one and two on the UK and US album charts, and the band selling out a residency at New York’s Madison Square Garden by the year’s end.

None of that could disguise the sense that the rock ‘n’ roll guard was changing. In October, Nirvana’s Nevermind led grunge out of the shadows, with Kurt Cobain cast as Axl Rose’s nemesis and Smells Like Teen Spirit doubling as the ultimate guitar-shop riff and a death knell to the old scene.

By contrast, starting with the limp 1993 covers album The Spaghetti Incident?, the world’s most dangerous band simply melted away. Slash quit in 1996. McKagan and Sorum were out the following year. Given that two decades later, tensions remain sufficiently high for Axl to call his old guitarist “a cancer and better removed”, a betting man would reckon the smart money’s on those red and blue albums being the last offerings we’ll get from the ‘real’ Guns N’ Roses.

So, no, Slash hasn’t listened to Use Your Illusion for years. Perhaps you can’t blame him. But as we wrap up our interview, it’s clear that he’s enjoyed the flashback, exorcised a handful of demons, and remembered that, beneath the mayhem and the madness, this is music to be proud of. He gives a smoky chuckle: “There’s a lot of good crap on those Illusion records…”

Henry Yates (Total Guitar)