Trigger Happy

Who do you reckon is the best singer?

S: Scott was my favourite rock’n’roll singer to come out since more or less Guns came out – someone who had an original persona, an original voice, an original approach.  I thought he was amazing – I have never even seen him play before, I just heard the songs on the radio.  So, at the end of the day he was the guy that we all wanted and nobody else came close but we did toy with the idea – well, we more than toyed with it, we fucking worked our fingers to the bone, trying to find somebody maybe nobody had heard of before.  We were auditioning people from all over the planet but it just didn’t happen.  There is amazing new talent out there but I guess it was fate that we got Scott.

Josh Abrahams has co-produced the album and in the past has worked with Staind, Soulfy and Limp Bizkit.  Was that a conscious desire of yours to hire him on that basis?

S: No.  When we did two songs for two movies last year (one was The Italian Job, a cover of ‘Money’, the Pink Floyd song, we also did ‘Set Me Free’ for The Hulk, and that was the first original song that we ever wrote), we recorded with Nick Raskulinecz, who did the last Foo Fighters record (and I liked the last Foo Fighters record) so when he came in, it was great to meet him but he didn’t have it together enough to record us properly.  We went into the studio with Bob Ezrin, who’s a world famous producer way back in the Alice Cooper days, but he over-saturated our material with sounds and too many effects.  Dave Kushner [VR guitarist] actually knew Josh but that didn’t float my boat either.  He came down any way and we had just written ‘Headspace’ so we thought, we’ll go into the studio with him and see what happens.  He came back with two takes of ‘Headspace’ and it was amazing.  That’s all we needed and that’s why we picked him.

Does the fact Scott has a troubled past bother you?

S: No, it actually attracted us!  The first and foremost thing was his talent as a singer and a performer.  He came in and said “I’m trying to get off heroin” – we’ve all been through that and we’ve all had years of experience in dealing with the ups and downs of chemical addictions, so that was his only real problem.  After coming to an agreement that the music thing worked, we had to figure out how he could get sober and we all helped him through it. 

D:  Slash and I have a pretty well documented drug and alcohol problem.  My pancreas blew up and I almost died and Slash died four times, so when Scott came in, he was chipping away on a nice heroin addict but he couldn’t lie to us.  Now we’re older, wiser and gnarlier.  It’s like we’ve fucking reversed.  I’m able to play better than I ever played before.  I don’t remember fucking anything back then – on my old passport from the Guns N’Roses tour, I got stamps of all the countries that I don’t remember going through.  I don’t remember concerts – luckily there is footage of them.  I went through the bloated Elvis phase because all my arteries stopped working.  It wasn’t fat, it was just fluid!  (laughs)  We can all joke about it now…

Is he doing OK?

S: He’s doing great.  He’s amazingly focussed.  The way things are right this second, we couldn’t ask for more.  As far as I’m concerned, having been in a real tumultuous career all the way up to this point with one of the greatest rock bands, you go through a lot of shit as human beings in a group, doing your own thing, fighting, the kind of standards the industry puts on you, trying to fucking make you perform, you go through a lot.