LOS ANGELES — 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.