The irony: over on the Other Stage it was Lana Del Rey – who once recorded a song called Axl Rose husband – who was late and had her headline set cut short. Meanwhile, former perpetual latecomer Axl Rose turned up bang on schedule and did what needed to be done reliably.
You have to feel slightly for Guns N’ Roses. In her pre-festival interviews, Emily Eavis made no secret of the fact that they were last minute subs for a headliner (rumoured to be Rhianna) who pulled out at the 11th hour. They continue a not-so-grand tradition of hard rock/metal on Worthy Farm: a musical genre that has long been underrepresented here.
And it was clear from the word go that this was a band who knew this and were very much here to please. For all of his ostensible menace and badassery, Rose was a polite, almost affable presence at odds with the persona presented in the likes of opener It’s So Easy. Said song – “Turn around bitch, I got a use for you” – was not the only lyric he sang exhibiting wildly outdated, late-Eighties-in-Los-Angeles style misogyny.
But though Guns N’ Roses may have sounded and looked like a band out of time – the heavily ripped denim jeans , cut off shirts... Slash – they also have a fistful of songs that are truly timeless. When Welcome To The Jungle arrived five songs in, it sounded absolutely titanic. Ditto Live And Let Die – sadly not featuring, as the rumour mill had it, Paul McCartney – and Sweet Child Of Mine and November Rain and a closing, epic Paradise City’
The problems came in-between these anthems. Too often when not playing a song that even their detractors couldn’t resist, Guns N’ Roses descended into guitar noodling of the type that time has forgotten. Nobody on planet earth does this kind of thing better than Slash, but part of the reason this is true is that in 2023 it’s an obsolete artform. Songs such as Velvet Revolver’s Slither thus tested the patience somewhat.
Still, while drawing a huge (if not as huge as Lizzo’s) crowd and providing Glastonbury with its first bona fide anthems, Guns N Roses was a triumph of sorts. You sense that they made some new admirers here, which was surely the point of them doing this show. The older people who loved them from the start, meanwhile, were well served.
Dave Grohl’s arrival on Paradise City – for two years running now he has contributed to the Pyramid Stage headline set on Saturday Night – provided a reminder of how much has changed since said glory days. Long ago, long before many people here were born, he was playing drums in Nirvana: a band whose main purpose was to bury the hair metal of Guns N’ Roses. Tonight though, he, Axl, Slash, Duff and some other fill-ins were together, united as old school rock and rollers in a world and at a festival where that kind of thing doesn’t really exist anymore. They were outsiders once again. It suited them.
