By Steve Newton
Ever since his death was announced last January, a lot has been said about guitarist John Sykes.
Filmmaker Damian Kolodiy said a ton himself, enough to fill up a two-part, four-hour documentary on YouTube.
A lot has been said about the way Sykes was poorly treated by Whitesnake’s David Coverdale, who fired him without cause after Sykes had cowritten seven of the nine tracks on the band’s self-titled 1987 album, which went on to sell over 25 million copies.
A lot has been said about the way Sykes helped instill a heavier, more metal vibe into Thin Lizzy with his work on Thunder and Lightning, the legendary band’s final studio album.
But maybe the most has been said about the formidable guitar talents that Sykes displayed to the world, whether via Whitesnake, Thin Lizzy, or his first band of note, Tygers of Pan Tang. Rock critics and guitar freaks the world over have been raving about how Sykes deserves far more credit in the guitar-hero pantheon than he’s received so far.
I was fortunate enough to have interviewed John Sykes when he was promoting the first album by his post-Whitesnake outfit, Blue Murder, a power trio that also included bassist Tony Franklin and drummer Carmine Appice.
Considering all the interest surrounding Sykes since his passing, I thought I should transcribe the entire 14-minute conversation word-for-word from that trusty cassette tape that first captured it way back when.
Hello.
Hello, John?
Yeah.
How you doing?
Steve!
How are ya?
How are you doing?
Pretty darn good.
Good man.
Whereabouts are ya? New York, or…
No, I’m in L.A.
Aw yeah. You live there?
Uh, yeah. I’ve got a place in England as well, but…
Congratulations on the new album.
Thanks.
I’ve just been listening to it. It’s hot stuff.
Yeah?
I was wondering how you to meet Carmine and Tony there.
Uh, well Tony, uh… Actually I was in a studio in England. After the Whitesnake situation, you know, where I split up there, I went back to England to start writin’ for this album. And I’d been in the studio a couple of months, and I had quite a bit of free time in there, and I was havin’ a break, and I rented the studio out to a guy to do some tape-copyin’. And we just sat down and was havin’ a chat, and stuff, and he said to me, “What would be the ideal situation band-wise for you?” And I mentioned Tony, and it turned out that this guy was married to Tony’s cousin!
So I said, “Can you get me a number?” and he said “Yeah”. So the next day he come back with a number and I called Tony and told him I liked his playing, and what I was up to, and would he like to come up and listen to some stuff and have a jam and he said, “Yeah”, which was great. He came up the next day after that, or a couple of days after that, and listened to the tunes and started jammin’, and it sounded fuckin’ great.
So that’s how I got Tony, and he was pretty much in straight-away. And originally it was going to be Cozy Powell on drums, ’cause I worked with Cozy prior on the [Whitesnake] Slide It In tour and stuff…
He’s a good drummer.
…yeah, and I was like eight months into the project, right, and then Cozy decided he wanted to get out and do some sessions and some other work, so he left. And then as it turned out Dio was playin’ in England, and Vinnie Appice heard that I was lookin’ for a drummer, and called [his brother] Carmine.
So Carmine flew to England and got me number from somebody down there and he called me up and said, “I hear you’re looking for a drummer”. So I said, “Yeah”, and I said, “Can you play like John Bonham-type stuff?” and he said, “Fuck yeah”. So he got in a car and drove up the next day, and we started jammin’ and it sounded fuckin’ amazing.
So were you a fan of his Vanilla Fudge band?
Uhhh, not particularly, ’cause there’s no guitars in it. To be honest with you, I wasn’t all that familiar with… I was more familiar with the Rod Stewart stuff. That’s why I asked him if he could play heavy, because the Rod Stewart stuff didn’t call for him to play like that. I think Carmine’s playing better than he’s ever played now with us.
Had you wanted to get your own power trio together for a while?
Uh, well, ever since…You see I got fired from Whitesnake…
What happened there with Whitesnake. Not getting along with Coverdale?
Well, we went and wrote the material together, it was in France, and I went over with just me and him alone and we wrote the songs for the album. After that we flew out to Los Angeles ’cause management was out here and the record company was out here, so we both come out here and found [drummer] Aynsley Dunbar, ’cause Cozy had just left. We went out and started recording the album in Vancouver, at Little Mountain, we laid the backing tracks down, and he went in to start doing vocals and had a problem doing the vocals. And we all wondered what was gonna happen.
So we took…and then they decided it was probably the weather that was causing his throat to stop to work, so we come back to Los Angeles and tried down here, and then we flew out to the Bahamas after that, and it still wasn’t happenin’. And this went on for a coupla years, ya know.
Finally he went in and had an operation on his throat and sang the album and said to me, “Look, go to England and do the guitar solos,” ’cause you lay them down after the vocals. And I went to England and did that, and halfway through guitars I found out that Mike Stone, the producer, had been fired, and [bassist] Neil [Murray] and Aynsley had been fired. And I thought, “This is strange”.
So now I found out that they wanted the tape back on that week ending, which was a Friday, and this was like Wednesday, and I kept phoning him up and he wouldn’t return any phone calls or anything.
What a hassle.
And he just like…he never even told us we was fired, he just sort of ignored us all and took the album and ran.
Kinda ignorant.
Yeah. So after goin’ through that situation with him, you know, I didn’t fancy going out of that and goin’ into another situation where I was workin’ for somebody else, and that could be done to me again. Especially when you’ve written the songs and you’ve worked so hard with somebody, and closely, you don’t expect to be treated like that.
And it’s funny, ’cause tonight I gotta go pick an award up for “Is This Love”, and I haven’t seen him since. So I’ll be bumpin’ into him tonight.
So you cowrote that song with him.
Yeah. I cowrote all of them except for…
There’s some good tunes on there.
…yeah, except for “Here I Go Again” and “Cryin’ in the Rain”, which I rearranged quite a lot of. See that’s what basically gave me the strength to want to go and do something like this.
How did you come to work with Bob Rock? Was that through the Whitesnake…
Yeah, because in Vancouver we recorded the basics for the ’87 Whitesnake album, Bob was next door doin’…he was workin’ with Bruce Fairbairn on Honeymoon Suite, and we kept bumpin’ into each other in the lobby and stuff. And we was talkin’ guitars, ’cause he plays guitar–and you probably know that anyway from bein’ up there.
Yeah.
And, you know, we sat down and Mike Fraser was workin’ on the Whitesnake album, and his wife had just had a baby, so he took a week off and Bob came in and worked with us. So he got me my guitar sound on the Whitesnake album, for the rhythm sound, and we’ve been friends ever since, really.
How do you find Bob Rock different from some of the producers you worked with in the past there?
Well I relate a lot better with Bob–Mike Stone’s a great producer too, you know, but Mike was tied up with things. And I didn’t want to use the same people that I used with the Whitesnake thing, you know. So, for me, Bob’s great to get along with because he plays guitar and he’s easy to talk to and stuff, and he’s into the heavy stuff. You know, I wanted like an early-’70s type of thing more than the late-’80s thing, and he’s into like early Purple and Zeppelin and all the old stuff.
Yeah. How long were you recording here in Vancouver?
We recorded up there for a coupla months. Well we did like six weeks and took a break and Bob did the Bon Jovi album, and then he did the Cult album, and we just carried on and kept on auditioning singers, ’cause we were lookin’ for a singer. And then after a lot of money and a lot of time spent on auditionin’ the boys finally turned around and said to me, “Look John, you just go in and sing it, ’cause you sing it best,” you know.
Yeah, I think you did a good job on the vocals on that.
Thanks. It took me a while to just get ’round to it, but once I got ’round to it it was alright, you know.
What did you do to pass the time between sessions in Vancouver here?
Ooo. Lotsa fun things, you know. The strip bars, the nightlife.
Did ya see any good local bands here?
Uh, hoo–I saw a lot, but by that time we’d drank a few iced teas, you know. My mind was driftin’ by that point.
I think I ran into you once down at the Embassy when Bon Jovi was showcasing some of their Slippery When Wet tunes.
Yeah?
Yeah.
Oh, I dunno. I don’t think so.
Do you have a particular favourite tune on the new album?
Uh…not really. I like pretty much all of them for different reasons. I like the track “Jelly Roll” and I like “Billy” because it reminds me of Thin Lizzy.
Yeah, right. I wanted to ask you about that. You dedicated the album to Phil Lynott.
Yeah.
I take it you were pretty close to him?
Yeah, we was great friends. And he looked after me a lot in the old days, and he sorta took me under his wing. I attribute a lot of my sort of success and stuff to the fact that he took me under his wing and showed me the ropes a lot. And plus there’s a coupla tracks on there like “Blue Murder” and “Billy”, like I said, that are like a Thin Lizzy type of track. I wanted to do that.
Yeah, Thin Lizzy were my favourite band back then.
Oh they were a great band. I really enjoyed that band.
You played on one of their albums, Thunder and Lightning.
Thunder and Lightning and the double-live one we did called Life.
Oh you were on that one too eh?
Yeah.
Do you ever hear from Scott Gorham any more?
No, I haven’t. I lost track with Scott because he moved away from London for a while. I think he took a break for a bit. And now someone just told me the other day that he’s back in town, so I told him to give him my number.
Do you think the Thunder and Lightning album rated with the best of the Lizzy albums?
Ummm. Well, I mean it’s a job to say. I liked Lizzy around the Live and Dangerous period. That was a great album. That’s one of me favourite albums. But I don’t know. Phil had such a character in his voice, you know, I liked all his albums, really. It was just a pleasure for me to be able to play with the band and do that album with them,
It was a real shock when I heard that he died there.
Yeah, it was. It was a real shock. Well, I had no idea.
So I hear Steve Vai has joined Whitesnake.
Yeah.
What do you think of that?
I just wonder why…what happened to the other two guitar players? He changes his band every five minutes, so… We’ll see how long it lasts with Steve. Steve’s a great guitar player. I’ll be curious to see how… I don’t know what his songwriting’s like. I’ll be curious to see, because, you know, Coverdale’s a very blues type singer, and Steve’s not really a blues player, he’s more of a Joe Satriani type of a thing. So I dunno. I’ll be curious to hear what it sounds like. ‘Cause I think Coverdale’s using a couple of my songs anyway, for this new album.
Is that right eh?
I think so. Because we had a coupla songs left over from what we wrote, and we went through a coupla lawyer things where I was askin’ if he was gonna use them, and he said he was, so we’ll see if he is.
Were you surprised at the huge success that Whitesnake had for a while there?
Well I was pleased about it, ’cause obviously the cheques roll in, and that’s nice. But I don’t know. I think it was a good album, and at the time there wasn’t a lot out to rival the album neither, so that’s pretty good. You know: the right place, right time, right thing. Plus nobody was doing that sort of “Still Of the Night” type of stuff, and I think that broke a lot of new ground. It got a lot of kids back into the bluesy type of element, you know.
Any chance of Blue Murder playin’ Vancouver soon?
Fuck I hope so. But we’re lookin’ at gettin’…well, actually Bon Jovi just played Vancouver didn’t they? We were just waitin’ to hear back today about the Bon Jovi tour. We might go out with them startin’ July first or somethin’. So we’re just keepin’ the fingers crossed.
Yeah, I hope you get here some time. How’s the album doin’, is it selling pretty good?
It’s doing good, it’s doing good. It jumped 70 places this week in Billboard, so…
What number is it now?
Uh, I think it’s, I think it’s around 100 and something.
Movin’ up?
Yeah, goin’ up with a bullet.
Good stuff.
But we haven’t released any singles yet, neither, so. The first one will probably be “Jelly Roll”. We just did a video, got a Hit Clip of the Week for two weeks on MTV with a track called “Valley of the Kings”. We just did a video for that, ’cause I wanted to establish the band as a rock band, you know, a heavy rock band to start with, rather than go with the more commercial ones, which are like “Billy” and “Jelly Roll” and that. So I wanted to just put one out for the rockers.
Well it sounds good and I think it’s gonna do really well for you John, and I hope to get to see you guys in Vancouver here some time.
Oh I hope to be playing there too, soon.
Yeah. And thanks a lot for your time there, eh.
Alright, thanks very much.
Nice talkin’ to ya.
Hope we’ll see you soon.
See ya John.
Bye bye.
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