Guitarist John Sykes, who performed with rock bands Whitesnake and Thin Lizzy, has died aged 65. He helped compose one of many energy ballads of the late ’80s hair-metal scene in “This is love“, which introduced gross sales of Whitesnake’s 1987 self-titled LP to over 8 million copies within the United States.
His demise was introduced in declaration on his web site, which mentioned he had died “after a tricky battle with most cancers.” The assertion doesn’t say when or the place he died.
Sykes joined Whitesnake in 1984 when the band’s frontman, former Deep Purple singer David Coverdale, requested him to switch founding guitarist Micky Moody whereas the British band toured behind that 12 months’s “Slide It In.” That album, Whitesnake’s sixth studio LP, broke the group within the United States, and Sykes continued to collaborate intently with Coverdale on “Whitesnake,” co-writing a lot of the album’s songs; the album reached quantity two on the Billboard 200 (behind Michael Jackson’s “Bad”) and spawned the MTV hit “Here I Go Again” – whose music video featured Coverdale’s future spouse, mannequin and actor Tawny Kitaen, that writhed on two parked Jaguars – as did “Still of the Night” and the poignant “Is This Love,” which reached No. 2 on the Hot 100.
Yet these iconic movies do not function Sykes, as Coverdale had fired the guitarist earlier than the “Whitesnake” album was launched — a firing Sykes mentioned he discovered about from the band’s A&R consultant.
“David did not say something to any of us in regards to the choice to kick us out of the band,” Sykes said Rock Candy journal in 2017. “I used to be livid and wasn’t going to just accept it. So I went to the studio the place David was nonetheless recording his vocals, able to face him. Honest to God, he ran away, received within the automobile and hid from me!”
In 2023, Coverdale said Metal Edge that “issues received bizarre” between him and Sykes and that “irrespective of how wonderful the album we made collectively was, we could not join as folks.”
Sykes was born in Reading, England, in 1959 and started enjoying guitar as an adolescent. He carried out with the bands Streetfighter and Tygers of Pan Tang earlier than becoming a member of the fashionable model of Thin Lizzy, who had scored a high 20 pop hit in 1976 with “The boys are back in town.Sykes performed on 1983’s “Thunder and Lightning,” Thin Lizzy’s final studio album earlier than founder Phil Lynott died in 1986.
After Whitesnake, Sykes fashioned the group Blue Murder with drummer Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge, then launched a solo profession; he additionally toured with a Lynott-less incarnation of Thin Lizzy.
Information about survivors was not instantly accessible.
