Monday 16 April 2018

Lucy Museum of Musicians - Guns N' Roses

Qualification to The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musicians is they must have a minimum of three songs which would make me turn up the radio if they came on.


Guns N' Roses
 
Qualifying Songs: Civil War, Paradise City, Sweet Child O' Mine,

If what you want in a band is for them to land like an explosion, churn out a couple of the greatest albums ever recorded and then implode spectacularly, then Guns N' Roses are for you.
Use Your illusions I and II was those rarest of albums where almost every song was brilliant and i remember queueing at midnight outside HMV on a balmy September night in 1991 to get my hands on the double Album.
The hard part is just picking three songs from the treasure trove of songs they had but 'Sweet Child O'Mine' ticks every box and is almost the perfect song, great lyrics, an amazing Slash guitar solo and ends as a different song to the one it started as.
Probably the greatest anti-war song ever penned, 'Civil War', and the opening lyrics of 'Look at your young men fighting, Look at your women crying, Look at your young men dying' should be etched on the forehead of every armchair general the next time war rears it ugly, ridiculous head. 
'Paradise City' where it goes double time and Axel wails the chorus repeatedly while Slash does magnificent things to the guitars fretboard is genius and if there is a city where Slash is topless playing his Les Paul and Axel is running around in tight Lycra shorts doing that snake hipped shimmy then that's Paradise right there.
Guns N' Roses were about the only band i would say i was sad about about when they broke up but as we were just launching into the Grunge scene it softened the blow a bit but for four glorious years they debauched their way around the charts, so much so that bass player Duff McKagan's Pancreas exploded and it doesn't get much more rock and roll than your bodies internal organs rebelling and trying to blow themselves up.

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