Review: Guns N’ Roses 2022 Australian tour faithfully hits all the right notes
Guns N’ Roses frontman Rose, 60, has the hardest job of all — is that why he kept disappearing in plain sight?
“You know where you are?” asked the singer, opening his eyes wide and giving a theatrical look around the cavernous space before him.
It was a Tuesday night at 7.30pm inside Brisbane’s biggest stadium, and tens of thousands of us had gathered to see one of the great hard rock bands perform – but Axl Rose saw it differently.
“You’re in the jungle, baby!” he screeched, and after a few more beats, completed the thought: “You’re gonna die!”
Barely 20 minutes into the second concert on Guns N’ Roses’ Australian tour, the singer and his six bandmates were working themselves into a frenzy. The opening barrage had been strong and impressive – but could they sustain the momentum?
The above words were delivered midway through Welcome to the Jungle, the opening track of one of the greatest debut albums in 1987’s Appetite for Destruction, a release that heralded this Los Angeles group as one of the most popular and talented acts of its era.
That was then, though, and a lot had happened since. Today, only a handful of rock bands can book and reliably fill stadiums, and judging by the abundance of spare seats inside Suncorp Stadium, this band was no longer one of them, at least not on this night.
Buying a ticket to a Guns N’ Roses show has long been a risky proposition undertaken with no small amount of trepidation.
Most fans know the sketch outline of the story: after living through massive, world-conquering success for almost a decade, things went south for GN’R in 1996 or thereabouts, when long-serving guitarist Slash and bassist Duff McKagan left, leaving Rose as the sole original member.
After replacing the entire band, one instrument at a time, the unit resumed touring – but the reviews could be kindly described as “mixed”, and Rose himself developed a habit of arriving late to stage, leaving arenas full of black-shirted fans on the edge of riot for hours on end. Not cool, not funny; just disrespectful.
In 2016, the near-unthinkable happened, when Rose, Slash and McKagan agreed to mend fences and perform together again for a series of shows titled “not in this lifetime” – a quip that Rose had once given when asked whether he’d ever reunite with his erstwhile co-conspirators.
Across more than 150 dates in three years – including six Australian stadium shows in February 2017 – the tour was touted as a triumph, both musically and commercially. It sold more than five million tickets worldwide to make it one of the most successful tours of all time.
Having not seen them five years ago, what unfolded on Tuesday night in Rose’s so-called jungle was entirely fresh to my eyes and ears. What was immediately apparent was that the band sounded hot and hungry, as it tore through a pair of Appetite classics in It’s So Easy and Mr. Brownstone.
Both tracks favoured the lower end of Rose’s remarkable vocal register, and by the time Slash began eking out the sinister perfection of the opening riff to Jungle five songs in, he was warmed up enough to comfortably hit most, if not all of its highest notes.
Like many hard rock and metal vocalists, Rose is forever chasing his tail, lumped with the task of attempting to replicate sounds that first emerged from his throat as a young man naive to what was about to follow.
Those vocal melodies and utterances were cut to wax and plastic, shipped around the world, and entered into the lives of hundreds of millions of people, who know the colour and contour of his vocal performances in their very cells.
That’s a longwinded way of saying that Rose, 60, has the hardest job of anyone up there. Each Guns N’ Roses concert lives or dies on the strength of the muscles in his throat.
It’s a hell of a lot of pressure, but the man rose admirably to the occasion on Tuesday, pulling focus at all times he was on stage – which was not always, for at stage left, there was a mysterious, black-curtained box into which Rose regularly retreated.
Sometimes he emerged wearing a new costume – he cycled through about eight black T-shirts in the course of the concert, including several Vegemite- and Australia-themed designs – but not always.
Sometimes he went into the black box for a few moments, mid-song, and came right back out, grabbing the mic stand and dancing as if one of the world’s most famous rock singers hadn’t just disappeared before tens of thousands of pairs of eyes.
Even from a great distance, with the figures on stage appearing in miniature while I sat on a plastic chair and drank beer from a plastic cup, this little subplot was weirdly, singularly compelling. What goes on in Axl’s black box? That’s for him to know, and for the rest of us to speculate.
Slash and McKagan, meanwhile, spent the entire show sweating into the same sleeveless shirts they were wearing when they walked onto the stage. The guitarist, in particular, is remarkable for adhering to the aesthetic he formed about 35 years ago, in music videos and in the popular consciousness.
Conjure Slash in your mind and that’s exactly what he was wearing: black top hat, curly black locks, aviator sunglasses that never left his eyes, impassive expression, rings and jewellery galore, red singlet, skinny black jeans, sneakers.
At 57, the guy’s look is a walking museum piece, frozen in amber from the late 1980s, and it’s a marvel – as is his guitar collection, of which he showed us seemingly dozens of instruments. He’s the kind of guitarist to bring at least two double-necked axes to every gig, and you know in your bones that he’ll fret every note at some point in the show, probably with his right foot leaning up against the stage monitors.
It’s worth mentioning here that the band played for three hours. Three hours. The seven performers walked out on stage at 7.10pm, and the boom-clap drumbeat of Paradise City began at 10.10pm.
What occurred between is best described as a masterclass in stadium-sized rock ‘n’ roll. What’s most impressive was not the pure duration; plenty of popular bands with deep catalogues could comfortably air nearly 30 songs across three hours.
Most big bands don’t, though, because most bands simply aren’t interested in trying that hard this deep into their career, and usually not in the world’s biggest venues. Two hours, tops: pretty much anyone would call that a great night’s entertainment.
No: what was most impressive was the deep engagement their performance inspired because of the utter commitment shown to their shared craft, which is why my attention never wandered.
Make no mistake: the singer spent years driving this band’s hard-earned reputation into the ground. This concert and this tour is a repayment for fans’ long-held faith; a restoring of the balance to its historical position as one of the best bands to ever do it.
“They were the last great rock band that didn’t think there was something a tiny bit embarrassing or at least funny about being in a rock band,” observed GQ writer John Jeremiah Sullivan in 2006. “There are thousands of bands around at any given time that don’t think rock is funny, but rarely is one of them good.”
That sentiment rang through my mind on Tuesday night, and still feels true. Guns N’ Roses is ridiculous at many levels – the musical bombast, the long-running interpersonal drama, the occasional deviations into over-earnestness – but it’s to the musicians’ credit that they take what they do seriously, and that they’re now in the collective frame of mind to over-deliver to those who love their music.
It was the second best rock gig I’ve seen in this venue next to Paul McCartney – whose song Live and Let Die was one of several covers to make an appearance, alongside an utterly surprising and beautifully sung take on Wichita Lineman, the Jimmy Webb classic.
This was a beautifully, faithfully executed concert that hit all the right notes and left nobody who laid their money down regretting the decision.
At times, I wondered whether the sheer polish and professionalism on show threatened to diminish the sentimentality of some of these songs – but then I remembered that sentimentality is mostly contained in what the audience brought to this art, and where it fits into their lives.
The musicians on stage were simply playing the notes, singing the words and melodies; the rest of it was up to us.
Guns N’ Roses tour continues at the Gold Coast (Thursday), followed by Sydney (Sunday), Adelaide (November 29) and Melbourne (December 3).
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