The Slash song that almost featured Thom Yorke
(Source: Far Out/Tidal)
There’s hardly a rock song that Slash wouldn’t find his place in. Although his trademark style screams hair metal from the very first second, his tasteful way of underscoring every song he plays never seemed odd, whether he was sharing a stage with every musician under the sun 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 with his debut solo album, he couldn’t bring himself to work with Thom Yorke on “Saint is a Sinner Too.”
But there really aren’t many bands that seem more stylistically different than Guns N’ Roses and Radiohead. Slash’s main band was made up of the metal icons who rocked out in the late 1980s and embraced sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, and Yorke was the leader of the group that never cared how many people were listening to them.
However, there was still at least some common ground. Yorke has always been a fan of working outside his comfort zone, on albums like OK Computers, so it would have been a great opportunity to play with an artist who embodied what rock’n’roll swag is, to step outside of his usual mold, as his other band was going out of business. In rainbow.
When Slash found time to collaborate, he never had the courage to contact Yorke. He said, “I really wanted Thom Yorke to do ‘Saint is a Sinner Too’ but I didn’t have the guts to call him. I didn’t think I could get him, so a friend recommended Rocco DeLuca – who was an incredible find.”
While DeLuca fronted the alternative rock band The Burden and did a passable job, the melody is tailor-made for Yorke’s voice. From the falsetto-heavy verses to the borderline eerie guitar passages, the entire track could easily have been a leftover from one of Radiohead’s rock-heavy albums, like The bends.
In fact, Yorke would have been just another flavor for this kind of track that Slash could have used on his album. Everything is held together as a focused project, but to put a lineup as diverse as Ozzy Osbourne, Fergie, Chris Cornell and Adam Levine on the same record and actually pull it off is a masterpiece of insane genius.
But Radiohead had already left the rock renaissance side of their sound behind, and when people noticed The King of Limbs a few years later, the group had shed its skin completely again. Instead of the traditional rock songs they returned to, Yorke traded in his guitar for loop pedals and favored glitchy soundscapes on tracks like “Bloom” that felt like the exact opposite of what Slash was aiming for.
The guitarist may 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 a mix of alternative and hard rock, and if Slash had had his way, we might have gotten one of the most wonderfully bizarre songs of the 2010s.
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