Guitarist John Sykes, who played with the stone songs Whitesnake and Thin Lizzy, has died at 65. He helped generate one of the defining authority songs of the late-1980s hair-metal field in “Is This Love, ” which drove profits of Whitesnake’s self-titled 1987 LP to sales of more than 8 million copies in the United States.
His death was announced in a statement on his site, which said he died “after a hard fought battle with cancer. ” The speech did n’t state when or where he died.
Sykes joined Whitesnake in 1984 when the band’s singer, past Deep Purple musician David Coverdale, asked him to change founding guitar Micky Moody while the English channel was on visit behind that year’s “Slide It In. ” That record, Whitesnake’s seventh studio LP, broke the cluster in the U. S. , and Sykes went on to collaborate closely with Coverdale for “ Whitesnake, ” co-writing most of the album’s songs; the song peaked at No. 2 on the Billboard 200 ( behind Michael Jackson’s “Bad” ) and spawned MTV staples“ Here I Go Again” — whose music video starred Coverdale’s future wife, model and actor Tawny Kitaen, writhing atop two parked Jaguars — as well as “Still of the Night ” and the yearning “Is This Love, ” which hit No. 2 on the Warm 100.
Yet those iconic videos don’t feature Sykes, as Coverdale had fired the guitarist before the “ Whitesnake” album was released — a dismissal Sykes said he found out about from the band’s A& R rep.
“David said little to any of us about having decided to kick us out of the group, ” Sykes told Rock Candy newspaper in 2017. “ I was furious and was n’t about to take this. So I went over to the theater where David was also recording his lyrics, prepared to confront him. Honest to God, he ran ahead, got in his vehicles and hid from me! ”
In 2023, Coverdale told Metal Edge that “things went squirrely ” between him and Sykes and that “no matter how incredible of an album that we made together, we were unable to connect as people. ”
Sykes was born in Reading, England, in 1959 and started playing piano as a student. He performed with the songs Streetfighter and Tygers of Pan Tang before joining a latter-day type of Thin Lizzy, which had scored a top-20 music hit in 1976 with “The Kids Are Back in Town. ” Sykes played on 1983 ’s “Thunder and Lightning, ” Thin Lizzy’s final studio album before founder Phil Lynott died in 1986.
After Whitesnake, Sykes formed the party Blue Murder with musician Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge, next launched a guitar job; he even toured with a Lynott-less manifestation of Thin Lizzy.
Information on victims was n’t instantly available.
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