1993.05.29 - National Bowl, Milton Keynes, England

Chopper rock

Guns N’ Roses, high on attitude, bring their macho moves to Milton Keynes

Caroline Sullivan

ASKED her favourite member of Guns N’ Roses, nine-year-old Joanna Holland from Northampton didn't hesitate. “Axl, because my mum says he sticks a cucumber down his shorts”. Then a song started with a terrible crash, and she screamed its first words — “Hey, fuckerrrr!" — and twisted her face into a Barbie Doll version of the Axl sneer.

Her hard-living, hard-loving, liver-destroying hero was an ant-figure on the distant stage at the National Bowl in Milton Keynes, his cucumber region covered by a baggy red T-shirt. Magnified to the size of an airship on three video screens, he cut a splendid dash: the rain-soaked wind whipped his hair out behind him and the stage lights (900 of 'em, according to the tour press release) sharpened the angles of his generic Midwestern features. As he sang a loud pub-rock song, he epitomised the simultaneous grandeur and idiocy of heavy metal.

What is surprising about Guns N' Roses is how spectacular they really are. From their separate helicopter arrivals to their stage, so large that it takes three days to construct, they embody a rock lifestyle that barely exists now outside This Is Spinal Tap. Even their names are purpose-built: W. Axl Rose, Slash, Izzy, Stradlin (briefly back in place of the ailing Gilby Clarke), Duff McKagan, Dizzy Reed and Matt Sorum. Axl summarised the whole thing in a song introduction: “This is called Attitood”.

The music is almost the least of it. The songs are 12-bar blues, mostly, screeched by Axl in one of the least mellifluous voices in hard rock. The most interesting were a jolly boogie-woogie bounce-along called I Used To Love Her and a sombre go at John Lennon's Imagine. During Knocking On Heaven's Door, the audience sang the chorus, pronouncing the last word, Axl-fashion, “Doe-woe-woe”. The 60,000 or so fans in a sell-out crowd were divided into males and vixens, the latter of the big-haired, small mini-skirted, variety. Tattoos were obligatory for both sexes.

The truly impressive thing was, as Rose said, the attitood, without which GN'R would be six nondescript hairies with some lumpenly macho tunes and cucumbers in their shorts.

Kittycat84 wrote:I'm so glad I found this, I'd been telling my family about this since I'm the girl in the report. Remember this day like it was yesterday, was pure luck I ended up on the press stand.