Guns N’ Roses guitarist Slash has finally broken his silence on Izzy Stradlin, wishing his former bandmate a happy birthday.
Slash wrote on Instagram, “Happy Birthday #IzzyStradlin ! iiii]; )'”
Duff McKagan tweeted, “Happy Birthday @IzzyStradlin999 !!”
Izzy Stradlin tweeted, “Thank you everyone for the birthday wishes !! Cheers !”
Manic Street Preachers bassist Nick Wire discussed his excitement over opening for Guns N’ Roses on their upcoming 2018 European tour in a new Drowned in Sound interview, but said he wants Izzy Stradlin and Steven Adler to join the reunion.
This summer you’ve been invited by Robert Smith to play the Southbank Centre as part of his curation at this year’s Meltdown festival, as well as supporting Guns’n’Roses on the German and Danish legs of their European tour. How did both of those come about, which one are you looking forward to the most, and will you be doing anything special for either?
You mean something like our cover of ‘It’s So Easy’ except with slightly dodgy lyrics? We did rehearse it and it sounded OK but I don’t know if I can sing those words where we are now 25 years later! We do have a couple of special things planned for The Cure’s Meltdown show which James is working on. We had an email from Robert Smith asking us to play, which is lovely as he’s one of our heroes. Then we got a message from Duff (McKagan) from Guns’n’Roses asking if we wanted to play some gigs which was amazing.
Those things really mean a lot to us. We’re doing the Olympic Stadium in Berlin which is fucking huge – if only Steven Adler and Izzy Stradlin were there as well! We’ve bumped into Duff a lot over the years and he’s one of the sweetest, most intelligent people in rock and roll. He’s an absolute diamond, so it will be great to see him again and watch them. You never know, we might be playing for 3 hours if Axl’s not that fussed about going on! When I saw the YouTube videos from last year they sounded really good. There was one show where Adler joined them for a few tracks and that was incredible; straight away they got their groove back. It’s just funny how some chemistries never disappear.
