Guns N’ Roses’ big-money reunion

By David Bennun

Rock’n’roll was dangerous for three decades. It was a period that began in the mid-1950s with the arrival of Elvis Presley and concluded with the decline of Guns N’ Roses, the glam/punk/metal titans whose partial reunion, after 20 years, was announced last week. True, there were moral panics aplenty around pop music before and after that time, and there will be again. But what marks out that era, and sets those artists as its bookends, is rock’n’roll acting as a vast commercial force, as the undisputed expression and essence of youth culture, and as a lightning rod for a sense of insurrection – a thing with the capacity to evoke amazement, thrills, fear and horror.

Guns N’ Roses first album, “Appetite For Destruction” (1987), remains the largest-selling debut in history: 18m copies in their American homeland, and 30m worldwide. It is a nasty record, in some ways an inexcusable one, from its original cover art based on Robert Williams’ eponymous painting of robotic rape, to the authentic sex noises recorded in the studio for its closing track “Rocket Queen”. Like much of the greatest rock’n’roll, it is powerful because it is unwholesome. It’s one of the most brilliant, exhilarating and transgressive blockbuster albums ever made. At that moment, its creators radiated what the pop writer Simon Price characterised as “fuckinghellness” – the ability to trigger uncontainable excitement and jaw-dropping incredulity at the very fact of their existence. This was rock’n’roll as vicious, screeching mayhem, performed by a group whose image, stage presence and well-documented dedication to the other two parts of the unholy trinity – sex and drugs – suggested a marauding gang of piratical sleazeballs. G N’ R, as they are colloquially known, were an affront to the ears and nostrils of civilised society, a Saturnalia in the flesh and in the speakers. As with the Sex Pistols before them, they instantly rendered redundant almost everything in mainstream rock. You didn’t have to like Guns N’ Roses to be blown away by them. You just had to be aware of them.