Slash — Laurel Canyon Childhood, Los Angeles

After leaving Stoke-on-Trent at age six, Slash — Saul Hudson — grew up in Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles, where his mother Ola Hudson's work as a costume designer brought him into contact with the music industry from childhood. David Bowie was a close family friend; Slash has described Bowie visiting the house and his grandmother's home. This immersion in professional rock culture shaped his ambitions, and by his mid-teens he was spending his days learning guitar and his nights finding his way into the Sunset Strip club scene that would produce Guns N' Roses.

Slash met Axl Rose through mutual friends in the early 1980s, and after various lineup permutations Guns N' Roses solidified in 1985 with Rose, Slash, Duff McKagan, Izzy Stradlin, and Steven Adler. Their debut Appetite for Destruction (1987) is one of the best-selling debut albums in history and a record that restored blues-rooted hard rock to the mainstream at precisely the moment critics had written it off. Slash's guitar parts — the 'Sweet Child O' Mine' intro, the 'Paradise City' solo, the 'Welcome to the Jungle' riff — are defining documents of the instrument.

Laurel Canyon's music history runs from the 1960s singer-songwriter era through the 1970s and into the 1980s hard rock scene that Slash inhabited. The Canyon Country Store at the junction of Laurel Canyon and Lookout Mountain Boulevards was the neighbourhood hub. Slash's specific childhood address in the canyon is not publicly documented, but the neighbourhood's character — forested, winding, surprisingly rural for central LA — shaped the young musician.