2024.09.08 - Belfast Telegraph - Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan: ‘Belfast is one the friendliest cities I’ve ever been to’

Guns N’ Roses’ Duff McKagan: ‘Belfast is one the friendliest cities I’ve ever been to’

Bassist looks back on his life and career ahead of gig in Dublin later this month

By Lee Campbell

Duff McKagan has seen and done it all. He was an original member of Guns N’ Roses and played bass on Appetite for Destruction, the best-selling debut album of all time in the US.

He was one of the last people to speak with Nirvana’s Kurt Cobain before his suicide in 1994, and just a month after that, McKagan almost died because of alcohol-induced pancreatitis, after which his doctors told him if he wanted to live, he would have to stop drinking immediately, which he did.

McKagan, who was also in Alice in Chains and Jane’s Addiction down the years, does the New York Times crossword every day to keep his brain active.

When I catch up with the 60-year-old, speaking from his Seattle home, he’s in fine form, looking and sounding relaxed.

McKagan will be hitting the road in the autumn to promote his third solo album Lighthouse, which he released late last year.
The first show of the European leg will be at Dublin’s Academy on September 30.

Duff has strong roots in Ireland, with family connections in Cork and Dublin.

He starts the conversation by telling me he’s just seen Stiff Little Fingers play in his native city — “they’re really good right now” — with Newtownards musician Ricky Warwick opening for the band with an acoustic set.

Duff has been taking it relatively easy and is enjoying having the chance to go to gigs again.

“It’s my first summer off in a while. I haven’t gone out to see a live band since maybe I was in my 20s,” he says.

While he is not making the trip up north this time around, Duff has played Belfast many times, including with Velvet Revolver, who he formed in 2002 with Guns N’ Roses bandmates Slash and Matt Sorum, and with his band Loaded.

He recalls: “The first time I was there, I was with Velvet Revolver. I could walk around the streets with my wife. I think we had our daughters too. People in Belfast are just so f*****g nice. They were bending over backwards to find us somewhere to get coffee. We were like, ‘This may be the friendliest city we’ve ever been to’. It’s not too big, or overwhelming. I’m a historian and I love Irish history.”

McKagan recently secured his Irish passport and is doing his best to get his wife Susan one too.

“She will at some point (become an Irish citizen),” he says. “She’s a much better-looking Irish citizen than I am.”

Before his first visit to Northern Ireland, he learned a little about the Troubles from listening to Stiff Little Fingers.

He says: “They really opened me up to what was going on over there. I didn’t know what Suspect Device meant. I was listening to Inflammable Material in the late 70s. My mum came in from work, looked at the record cover and said ‘Oh, these poor boys, they are growing up in the Troubles’. She sat me down and talked to me all about it. Suddenly this music took on a whole new level. It was like the Pistols with Anarchy in the UK, or The Clash. They were the best history or cultural anthropology class combined.”

Slash was responsible for pointing him towards another couple of big Irish artists.

“I remember him turning me onto the bluesy aspect of Gary Moore, which I wasn’t aware of,” he says. “I learned a lot about guitar players like Rory Gallagher from Slash. I was there the first time Slash ever got up on stage and jammed with somebody outside of Guns N’ Roses. It was with Rory Gallagher at The Roxy Theatre in LA in 1991.”

At this point in the conversation, I am introduced to Duff’s dog Hadley — sadly not named after Spandau Ballet lead singer Tony — who almost gets thrown out of the room for chewing on the rug in a bid for attention. A cute dog sitting on his knee is not the picture I had in my head of Duff McKagan before the interview began.

As well as walking Hadley regularly, McKagan is a sports nut. His passion for sport led him into writing a weekly column for ESPN.com, and he regularly takes in games with his friend Jerry Cantrell, the Alice in Chains guitarist. This long-time friendship also found its way onto McKagan’s new album, on the track I Just Don’t Know, which Cantrell plays on. It’s a song he created while reflecting on life during the Covid pandemic.

He says: “I was out walking our dog. There was nobody around, it was night-time and I was by the lake looking at the stars. When you are walking your dog... it was such an innocent enterprise, the lyrics for the song just came. I didn’t have my phone so I couldn’t make a note. I just had to keep repeating the lyrics, turn our dog around and go home so that I could write them down. The song is a reflection of the past for me. I don’t get personal that often, but it’s a curiosity about what’s out there, what’s next? I don’t know if this is my age. During the pandemic, I definitely did reflect more, everybody did. Writing reflective lyrics at that time was cool and healthy.”

Another standout track on the album is Fallen Ones. Duff gives me the backstory on this one: “Unfortunately, I had a friend who just passed away. He was a guy I got reacquainted with in the past five years. He came up in the punk rock days and got mixed up with heroin, but he got sober in the early 90s, before I did. We were talking about being fortunate to make it through and remembering those who haven’t. That’s where that line sort of came from — ‘This goes out to the fallen ones’. I realise that every day. I wake up every morning grateful. I recognise I could be someplace else, or dead.”

It was made very clear when setting up the interview that Duff wanted to focus on his new music, not his time with Guns N’ Roses. However, I could not leave the conversation without asking him about the current state of play and how long they intend to keep the band around.

He says: “Listen, I saw The Stones a couple of weeks ago, and Mick, who’s over 80, dances around like a 30- year-old. I’m only 60 so I better get f*****g busy.”

Duff McKagan’s latest album Lighthouse is out now. He plays the Academy in Dublin on September 30.

https://www.belfasttelegraph.co.uk/sunday-life/news/guns-n-roses-duff-mckagan-belfast-is-one-the-friendliest-cities-ive-ever-been-to/a1451906839.html