Guns N’ Roses
3Arena, Dublin
★★★★★
For nearly a quarter of a century Guns N’ Roses fans waited and wondered if the original line-up would ever stage a reunion.
Such was the enmity between Axl Rose, the band’s singer, and Slash, its lead guitarist, that many presumed it would not happen. “Not in this lifetime,” Rose said in response to this inevitable question in 2012.
The band’s reunion tour was somewhat ironically called Not in This Lifetime. It made nearly $600 million playing to more than 4.8 million people. Among them were the 80,000 fans who attended Guns N’ Roses’ Slane Castle gig, in May 2017. That was an altogether more polished and professional performance than the addled mess from 1992 when they were the biggest band in the world.
They played another concert in Ireland at Marlay Park in June 2022, this time to 40,000 fans. On Wednesday night they play 3Arena, which can hold 13,000 fans.
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They were infamously late for the Slane show in 1992; even more infamously, in 2010, their concert had to be stopped twice and didn’t finish until the early hours because Rose hadn’t turned up in time.
Guns N’ Roses’ present incarnation is nothing if not punctual. The clock hasn’t even hit the appointed time of 8pm when the spinning vortex video begins to play on the big screen and then it’s time for the staccato guitar intro to Welcome to the Jungle.
The band blast through a medley of standards, some blue (Bad Obsession), some borrowed (including Paul McCartney’s Live and Let Die) and many from their own catalogue (It’s So Easy, Mr Brownstone, Estranged, You Could Be Mine). The presence of Slash and Duff McKagan makes Chinese Democracy, from the 2008 album from which they were absent, sound like a Guns N’ Roses cover.
On and on it rolls. You’re constantly reminded how good they were back in the day and that they have no successors. Where are the contemporary great rock bands?
Rose jumps up and down on a raised dais, covering every metre of the stage, holding the high notes just when you think he can’t. McKagan, the band’s resident Irishman, whose ancestors came from Co Cork, does a punkish version of Thin Lizzy’s Thunder and Lightning.
The band sound tight as a submarine door – and so they should be. They’ve been hawking this greatest-hits tour under different guises since their reunion. Familiarity breeds scepticism, if not contempt. The novelty of this most storied of bands coming out of self-imposed retirement has worn off, and what’s left are the hard-core fans.
The crowd are on their feet for Sweet Child o’ Mine and then November Rain, one of those piano ballads that diehard rock fans originally scoffed at but have weathered well. Nightrain and Paradise City round off a set that lasts two hours and 45 minutes without an encore.
It’s hard to fault the band’s back catalogue or their application, but the elephant in the room – more like a giant woolly mammoth growing year by year – is the absence of new material.
The 3Arena set has just two new songs, the piano ballad Nothin’, which builds and builds to a thunderous Slash guitar solo, and another song that Rose unhelpfully introduces as a new song, without giving a title. (Answers on a postcard, please.) The song has a dystopian backdrop of the Statue of Liberty; maybe it’s a song about the current state of the US.
But even the new material that Guns N’ Roses play is recycled stuff from Chinese Democracy, which did not include the original line-up. Incredibly, the last original material from the original band is from the early 1990s.
The world doesn’t need another Guns N’ Roses world tour. It needs a new Guns N’ Roses album. Get back in the studio, lads, before it’s too late.
