An athletic recovery from an onstage stack is not the thing you’d expect to propel Slash to viral fame.
As the Guns N’ Roses guitarist charged across the stage during the final gig of the European tour in Paris last month, his bandmates unexpectedly shifted directions.
To avoid a collision with the pointy end of a guitar or slamming into his friends, Slash dropped, rolled and sprang back to his feet.
Impressively, he didn’t miss a note nor was he injured in the stage fall during Nightrain which has been viewed millions of times across TikTok and Instagram.
Slash laughed when asked if he’d been practising commando rolls for just such an occasion.
“It’s funny! I got going across the stage and all of a sudden I realised there was traffic there, the other guys in the band were all sort of down there,” he said.
“I could see (a crash) coming so I tried to sort of correct myself before I ran into anybody and I just lost my balance.
“I knew I was going down and it’s something you learn in BMX that if you’re going down, you have to prepare for it. I didn’t want to lose the tempo of the song.”
Guns N’ Roses bring their 2026 world tour to Australian stadium stages in November and December, their third run of shows here since founding members Slash and Duff McKagan reunited with Axl Rose in 2015. The trio had not shared a concert stage since 1993.
Slash said “no one’s mind was more blown than mine” when someone in the band’s camp mentioned it is “coming up” to 11 years since he rejoined the band.
“That first gig that we did at the Troubadour (in West Hollywood) on April Fools, 2016, just seems like a couple of years ago,” he said.
“I mean, 10 years is a decent chunk of time, you know? And we haven’t had one internal issue the entire time.”
Perhaps the surest sign of the steadfastness of a band once regarded as the most volatile and dangerous in the world is new songs.
Atlas and Nothin’, which were released in December last year, are regulars on the Guns N’ Roses setlist this year; both were written during the Chinese Democracy recording sessions in the late 1990s and early noughties and then finished off with input from Slash and McKagan on their return to the band.
A new record featuring this line-up is on the cards.
“I’m looking forward to when we actually go in and make a new record and start doing that whole thing,” Slash said.
“We’ve just been doing so much writing, but we haven’t like sat down to carve out the time and work on the record, but, it’s coming.”
Slash’s schedule may be the most crowded of the Guns line-up. As well as myriad recording projects including The Conspirators side band with Myles Kennedy, he co-founded a horror film and television production company.
His latest success as an executive producer is The Crow Girl, a psychological thriller series now in its second season and adapted from the Swedish book trilogy by Erik Axl Sund.
“The first season was good, but it was really a setup for the chaos that is season two. And then that’s it, there’s no third season,” he said.
“I’ve been doing the movie thing for a bit now, and I’ve got a lot of new movies coming out next year but this was my first TV experience and it just cool to see it develop from the ground up and make it into people’s living rooms.”
During Guns N’ Roses European tour, Slash occasionally crossed paths with Return to Dust, the rising rock band featuring his son London Hudson on drums.
“He did play on the Download festival with us so we went over his stage earlier in the day and checked him out,” Slash said.
“It’s fun for me to watch them doing their first tour of Europe because they’re playing all the same festivals that I started out with and all the same clubs.”
His youngest son Cash is not in the family business. “He’s a full-on professional bodybuilder,” Slash said.
Guns N’ Roses are currently back on the road in the US, with the shows underpinned by a charitable mission close to Slash and his longtime partner Meegan Hodges.
The band has partnered with the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention two years after the death of his 25-year-old step-daughter Lucy-Bleu Knight.
“There’s a lot of people suffering and it’s important to let it be known that there’s support, there’s people to talk to and there’re places to go,” he said.
“Not too long ago my stepdaughter killed herself…and that was a really hard thing (for us). It came from a mental health situation for her and we tried so hard, but it was just something, at the end of the day, we just didn’t have any control of.
“So then it made the whole suicide awareness thing that much a bigger deal.”
After the bp Adelaide Grand Final concert on November 29, Guns N’ Roses head to the Queensland Country Bank Stadium in Townsville on December 2, followed by Brisbane’s Suncorp Stadium on December 5, McDonald Jones Stadium in Newcastle on December 8, Marvel Stadium, Melbourne on December 11 and finally Sydney’s ENGIE Stadium on December 14. All ticket detils via livenation.com.au