1988.12.15 - Entertainment Centre, Melbourne, Australia

If only Axl rose
Date March 2, 2013
James Hughes

AUSTRALIA and Guns N' Roses have always had ears for each other. The original band dipped its lid to the Angels and Rose Tattoo. For hard-rock fans here, Appetite For Destruction retains more than a touch of touchstone prestige.

In Melbourne, the band has an interesting track record. Plenty of people remember the infamous 1993 Calder Park Raceway show, a rock'n'roll swindle that left scores dangerously dehydrated and just as many marooned. The less said about a 2007 junket the better.

In 1988, they came with a first album spreading like wildfire. I was a green 16. School had broken up. On a balmy Friday, I left Mornington to find the Melbourne Entertainment Centre. I sported yellow Billabong shorts, a white, floppy T-shirt and my good cricket runners.

Everybody else had armed in black.

The glass panels at the entertainment centre trapped the daylight-saving sun. Keyed-up faces multiplied and milled; kissing tickets, slapping high-fives. A Def Leppard T-shirt was flung into a tree, where it hung like a sleeping bat. All at once, we were coursing in. The frisking gave me a buzz - I was dangerous.

In the lair, currents of energy circulated. The stage was a dark altar. My side-on perch was so close it felt voyeuristic.

Down on the floor, a lanky kid in a top hat and shades was perched on the back of his seat, surveying his domain, beaming at his brethren, nodding slowly and continuously; a clown-prince sage. When he raised his arms in a V and all of us to a body began cheering him, he did not exactly shun the attention.

The lights went down. AC/DC's Back in Black burst from the PA and the floor went berserk. The lights came up. Up went a rolling wounded howl heard from the moon.

Each time the lights went down we roared. Each time they came up we bayed.

In swinging searchlights the group hustled and menaced onto the stage. From the floor came a noise so animal raw and ardent, I gaped there, instead.

The first song disoriented everybody. On the LP, You're Crazy was a banshee riding a tempest. Now we were getting it strummed, on lazy-looking acoustics. I tried singing along but the singer, the guy who called himself W. Axl Rose, would only elongate and desecrate each line. Others around me had the same lack of rhythm, the same disoriented body-language.

At song's end, he surveyed an uninspired crowd and said, in jarring, oaken timbre, ''I cannot hear shit up here''.

It was the coldest thing I had heard anybody say to an assemblage. We waited for him to say something conciliatory. His guitarists avoided looking at him, as if they didn't wish to further upset him, or show any glimpse of dissent.

The next 40 minutes were a blur: kick drum pulsing ahead of time; singer disappearing off-stage for oxygen: primordial-looking guitarist Slash in torn skin-tight black Levis and nothing more, throwing back his mass of black spirals, spitting into the airflow of the biggest fan I had ever seen.

They were like a pirate ship in a savage storm, fighting to maintain course, utterly without course, led by a seething, sinewy captain in a tangle of emotional threads. One minute they fell apart. The next they'd give you gooseflesh. Guitars snarled in sync one verse, and the next they were on separate stages. Slash soared like a Pegasus, and then bombed like a lead balloon.

At the heavy heart of an old Bob Dylan song called Knocking on Heaven's Door, every light in the house came up and 7000 faces lit up. Bass and drums settled into gentle, improvised interlude, as the house lights caressed off and on. The singer looked, in those minutes, humbled by his station. ''F--k off … will you look at that?'' - one foot on the monitor, as if we were all sailing into a sunset.

The rest of the time he gave the impression he'd been done an injustice; storming around in his horse-riding pants. He wasn't happy with the local opening act, either - Kings of the Sun singer Jeffrey Hoad, a towering Queenslander, had mooned the crowd for fun. Rose, incensed that a piece of his publicity might be purloined, barked about ''asshole wannabes takin' off their panties''. Minutes later, leaving to thunderous ovation, his face whipped around in acerbic mock-shock as he bent and flashed his stark shiny-with-sweat arse.

In the open air we milled and flowed. Boisterous packs devised plans. Two kids going their separate ways gripped thumbs, American style. ''Later.'' I made a mental note to start saying it to my friends.

That night feels like a turbo-boost in our appetite for American mannerisms and markings - for its sounds and ways.

Not that the town had no homespun heroes. Johnny Farnham's fans had left The National Tennis Centre like innumerable teddy bears leaving a picnic. Alan Border's men had won at the MCG and satiated fans made perfunctory noises with green and yellow plastic trumpets. I fell in and out with all three camps on my way to Flinders Street.