'We'd made Appetite and then toured for years and - for me, and I know for a couple of the other guys - we'd crashed and burned. Push him on it, though, and the dam breaks: 'I was just totally obsessed with the creation of the Illusion records and when I got into that studio, I was completely absorbed with everything to do with them, all the time.

'I don't like to go back and look at stuff, because I find it mesmerising,' Slash says. There are memories in this music - musical, personal, glorious and painful recollections- and you sense that listening to it is like sifting through the old photos from a failed marriage. It's that while making the Illusion records, he cared about nothing else, losing himself to these 30 songs while holed up in Studio B of LA's Record Plant as a kind of heroin withdrawal programme. It's a worrying start to an interview that's based around the 20th anniversary of these twin albums, but things soon warm up. I know people like the blue one over the red one… Or maybe it's the other way around.'Įr, right. 'I haven't listened to the Use Your Illusion albums for so long, I don't even know what's on each. 'I don't know which one I prefer,' he tells us straight out of the blocks.

Slash from guns and roses