Guitarist John Sykes, who played with the rock bands Whitesnake and Thin Lizzy, has died at 65. He helped compose one of the defining power ballads of the late-1980s hair-metal scene in “Is This Love,” which drove sales 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 website, which said he died “after a hard fought battle with cancer.” The statement didn’t say 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 Micky Moody while the British band was on tour behind that year’s “Slide It In.” That album, Whitesnake’s sixth studio LP, broke the group in the U.S., and Sykes went on to collaborate closely with Coverdale for “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 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 Hot 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 nothing to any of us about having decided to kick us out of the band,” Sykes told Rock Candy magazine in 2017. “I was furious and wasn’t about to accept this. So I went down to the studio where David was still recording his vocals, prepared to confront him. Honest to God, he ran away, got in his car 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 guitar as a teenager. He performed with the bands Streetfighter and Tygers of Pan Tang before joining a latter-day version of Thin Lizzy, which had scored a top-20 pop hit in 1976 with “The Boys 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 group Blue Murder with drummer Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge, then launched a solo career; he also toured with a Lynott-less incarnation of Thin Lizzy.
Information on survivors wasn’t immediately available.