The Slash song that almost featured Thom Yorke: “I didn’t think I could get him”
There aren’t many rock songs that Slash couldn’t find his place in. Although his trademark look screams hair metal from the moment that he steps onstage, his tasteful way of filling in every song he plays has never felt bizarre when working with every musician under the sun, whether that’s appearing onstage with Carole King or contributing a handful of guitar fills to a Bob Dylan record. When the guitar god finally got the rest of the world to come to him on his debut solo album, he couldn’t bring himself to work with Thom Yorke on ‘Saint is a Sinner Too’.
But, really, there aren’t many bands that seem further away from each other style-wise than Guns N’ Roses and Radiohead. Slash’s main outfit had been the metal icons who kicked ass across the late 1980s and lived up to sex, drugs, and rock and roll, and Yorke was the leader of the group that never bothered caring about how many people were listening to them in the first place.
There was still at least a little bit of common ground, though. Yorke was always a fan of working outside his comfort zone on albums like OK Computer, so playing with an artist who epitomised what rock and roll swagger would have been a great opportunity to get out of his usual wheelhouse as his other band was coming off of In Rainbows.
Once Slash had the time to collaborate, he never had the guts to contact Yorke, saying, “I really wanted Thom Yorke to do ‘Saint is a Sinner Too’, but I didn’t have the balls to call him. I didn’t think I could get him, so a friend recommended Rocco DeLuca—who was an amazing discovery.”
While DeLuca had been fronting the alternative rock band The Burden and did a serviceable job, the melody is tailor-made for Yorke’s voice. From the falsetto-heavy verses to the borderline-spooky guitar passages, the entire track could have easily been a leftover on one of Radiohead’s rock-leaning albums like The Bends.
In fact, having Yorke on this kind of track would have just been another flavour that Slash could have sampled for his album. Everything is held together as a focused project, but getting a roster as varied as Ozzy Osbourne, Fergie, Chris Cornell, and Adam Levine on the same record and actually pulling it off is a work of mad genius.
But Radiohead had already gone through that rock renaissance side of their sound, and by the time people picked up The King of Limbs a few years later, the group had shed their skin all over again. Instead of the traditional rock songs they got back in touch with, Yorke traded his guitar for loop pedals, preferring glitchy soundscapes on tracks like ‘Bloom’, which felt like the polar opposite of what Slash had been going for.
The guitarist might not have found his place in Yorke’s world, but listening to ‘Saint is a Sinner Too’ doesn’t feel like a true Slash song, either. This is the sound of alternative and hard rock blending together, and if Slash had had his way, we might have been in for one of the most wonderfully bizarre songs of the 2010s.
