Slash Says He and Axl Rose Are Speaking Again

Slash has revealed that he and Axl Rose are on friendly terms again. In a new interview with Sweden’s Aftonbladet the guitarist says he and the singer have put aside their differences and have been speaking to one another.

“It was probably way overdue, you know?” Slash said. “But it’s very cool at this point to dispel some of that negative stuff that was going on for so long.”

The animosity between Slash and Rose goes back years. The guitarist quit Guns N’ Roses in October 1996 and told Rolling Stone in 2012, “[Axl] hates my guts. It’s over a lot of different stuff; I don’t even know.”

Slash had noted in May that the two had begun to make peace, saying, “We don’t have all those issues anymore. There’s not a lot of controversy. It’s something that’s more perpetuated by the media than anything.”

The timing of a reconciliation seems fortuitous. Guitarists DJ Ashba and Ron “Bumblefoot” Thal recently announced their departures from Guns N’ Roses, leaving the group in need of an ax slinger or two.

But Slash is not about to commit to any future collaborations with Rose.

“Oh, I couldn’t answer that one,” he says, adding, “Let’s get off the subject because that’s an old one.”

Rose, for his part, has shown little interest in working with his former bandmates. When the original GN’R lineup was inducted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2012, Rose didn’t attend the ceremony and wrote an open letter putting any hopes of a reunion to rest.

“Let sleeping dogs lie or lying dogs sleep or whatever,” he wrote. “Time to move on. People get divorced. Life doesn’t owe you your own personal happy ending especially at another’s, or in this case several others’, expense.”