Guns N' Roses, legendary heavy metal band, plays the Download Festival at the RDS on Friday, the 9th of June.
Guns N' Roses come to the captiol showcasing songs from their forthcoming album, Chinese Democracy with one of their legendary live shows.
Guns N' Roses came to prominence in the late '80s and went on to become one of the biggest rock acts in the world.
The original line-up comprised the blistering rock riffs of Slash and Izzy Stradlin on guitars, the thunderous beats of rhythm section of Duff McKagan on bass and Steven Adler on drums and the manic shriek of Axl Rose on vocals.
Guns N' Roses released their first EP, Live ?!@ Like A Suicide in 1986 and caught the attention of Geffen Records who signed the band. In the following years, the band released their debut album, Appetite for Destruction but the album start selling when MTV started giving heavy rotation to the modern rock classic, "Sweet Child o' Mine".
The single for "Sweet Child o' Mine" went straight to number one and Appetite for Destruction sold a staggering twenty million copies. Guns N' Roses followed with the hit singles, "Welcome to the Jungle" and "Paradise City", while fostering a huge international cult audience which crossed all music categories.
To promote the album, Guns N' Rose began touring the world and filling rock gossip columns with their mythic tales of rock excess. The band followed up their debut album with G N' R Lies in 1988, combining their first EP, Live ?!@ Like A Suicide with collection of acoustic songs including the hit single, "Patience" and the controversial "One in a Million".
At the end of 1990, Guns N' Roses reconvened to start work on their new album but the pressure of trying to replicate the success of one of the best selling albums of all time was starting to show. The band fired Adler and replaced him with new drummer, Matt Sorum from The Cult and added Dizzy Reed on keyboards.
By the time the album was finished, Guns N' Roses had recorded enough tunes for two albums and subsequently released Use Your Illusion 1 and Use Your Illusion 2 in 1991, taking the top two spaces on the album charts.
At a time when Guns N' Roses seemed poised to define rock music for the rest of the '90s, Nirvana unleashed Nevermind in 1992. Alternative rock became all the fashion and the rock grandeur of Guns N' Roses videos like "November Rain" and "Don't Cry" began to seem pretentious and excessive.
The wheels started coming off with Izzy Stradlin, the band's best songwriter, leaving the band to be replaced by Gilby Clarke and the band releaseing a covers album, The Spaghetti Incident? which failed to reignite the band's former glory.
After Rose left original members of the band out of the final mix of their interpretation of "Sympathy for the Devil" for Interview for the Vampire, Slash left the group, leaving Axl Rose the remaining original member of the group.
Over the last decade, Guns N' Roses have released a new song, "Oh My God" which was featured on the soundtrack of End of Days in 1999, toured the world for the first time in a decade in 2002 and put the finishing touches on their first album of original material in fifteen years with Chinese Democracy.
A night of contemporary rock classics, Guns N' Roses play the RDS on Friday, the 9th of June.
Time: 8pm
Tickets: €64.50/€75
Tickets are available from Ticketmaster outlets, www.ticketmaster.ie
RDS
Ballsbridge
Dublin 4.
Tel: + 353 (0) 818 719 300
