Slash and burn: The Guns N’ Roses guitarist has a new album out, and it’s a blues tribute

Few rock stars are as instantly recognisable from their silhouettes as Slash is. In 1996, when he first left GNR, he formed Slash’s Blues Ball, a blues rock band that was active for a couple of years, touring and playing gigs. To savour some of his truly bluesy guitar-playing, I would recommend the YouTube videos of gigs that Slash’s Blues Ball played in the late 1990s. Their covers of classics such as Jimi Hendrix’s Stone Free, BB King’s The Thrill Is Gone and Muddy Waters’ Hoochie Coochie Man are unique, mainly because of how Slash plays the guitar on them. The septuagenarian Iggy Pop, known as the godfather of punk, sings a strikingly tender version of the Lightnin’ Hopkins song Awful Dream, on which he also uses his vocals to mimic a blues harp; the pop singer Demi Lovato does a cover of the Motown staple Papa Was A Rolling Stone; blues guitar sensation Gary Clark Jr sings and plays with Slash on the Robert Johnson classic Crossroads; and the veteran Paul Rodgers sounds fittingly perfect on Born Under a Bad Sign, which was first recorded by the bluesman Albert King in the 1960s.