Guitarist John Sykes, who played with rock bands Whitesnake and Thin Lizzy, has died at the age of 65. He helped write one of the defining popular songs of the late 1980s hair metal scene in “Is this love?“, which propelled Whitesnake’s 1987 self-titled LP to sales of over 8 million copies in the United States.
He was declared dead in statement On his website, he said he died “after a fierce battle with cancer.” The statement did not mention when or where he died.
Sykes joined Whitesnake in 1984 when the band’s frontman, former Deep Purple vocalist David Coverdale, asked him to replace founding guitarist Mickey Moody while the British band was on tour behind the single “Slide It In” that year. This album, Whitesnake’s sixth studio LP, broke the group in the US, and Sykes continued to collaborate closely with Coverdale on “Whitesnake”, co-writing most of the album’s songs. The album peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 (behind Michael Jackson’s “Bad”) and spawned the MTV hit “Here I Go Again” — the music video of which starred Coverdale’s future wife, model and actor. Brown kittenwrithing over two parked Jaguars — as well as the ballad “Still of the Night” and the yearning “Is This Love,” which reached No. 2 on the Hot 100.
However, these famous videos do not feature Sykes, as Coverdale fired the guitarist before the release of the “Whitesnake” album – a dismissal that Sykes said he found out about from the band’s A&R representative.
“David didn’t say anything to any of us about his decision to kick us out of the band,” Sykes said He said Rock Candy magazine in 2017. “I was angry and I wasn’t about to accept this. So I went to the studio where David was still recording his vocals, ready to confront him. Honestly, God Almighty, he ran away and got into his car and hid from me!
In 2023, Coverdale He said Metal Edge said that “things moved quickly” between him and Sykes and that “no matter how great an album we made together, we couldn’t connect as people.”
Sykes was born in Reading, England, in 1959 and began playing guitar as a teenager. He performed with the bands Streetfighter and Tygers of Pan Tang before joining the latter-day version of Thin Lizzy, who scored a Top 20 pop hit in 1976 with “The boys returned to town.Sykes played on 1983’s “Thunder and Lightning,” Thin Lizzy’s last studio album before the death of founder Phil Lynott in 1986.
After Whitesnake, Sykes formed the group Blue Murder with drummer Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge, and then began a solo career. He also toured with the Lynott-less incarnation of Thin Lizzy.
Information about survivors was not immediately available.
