Pyramid stage
With a beaming Dave Grohl guesting on guitar and hits interspersed with homages to their influences, Axl and co make for hard-rocking – yet surprisingly polite – Saturday headliners
The most immediately startling thing about Guns N’ Roses’ headlining set is how polite Axl Rose is. He’s the famously unpredictable frontman of a band who, in their late 80s heyday, oozed druggy negativity: their debut album Appetite for Destruction painted such a relentlessly grim and grimy picture of life in Los Angeles that Justin Quirk’s brilliant history of 80s metal Nothin’ But a Good Time posits the theory that its release, rather than the arrival of Nirvana, spelled the end of the hair metal era and irreparably punctured its facade of sleazy glamour. Now, in his 60s, he’s turned into a surprisingly well mannered character. “We’d like to thank you for inviting us,” he offers. “Have you had a good day? Glad to hear it.”
But the current iteration of Guns N’ Roses sound remarkably vital: the twin guitars of Slash and Richard Fortus playing off against each other, drummer Frank Ferrer underpinning the songs with a surprising degree of funk and swing. If Axl Rose’s falsetto sounds a little rougher around the edges than it did thirtysomething years ago, he still hits the high notes. Less weird-looking now than in the years when he sported braids and a goatee beard, he still pulls off the selection of onstage moves identified by the American writer John Jeremiah Sullivan in his superb 2006 essay The Final Comeback of Axl Rose: stalking, cartoonish pugnaciousness; snaky slide-foot dance; dammit just dropped a bowling ball on my foot spin-with-mic-stand dance; prance sideways with mic stand like an attacking staff-wielding ritual warrior between-verses dance.
