Music Sounds Better With You #3

Apologies - this wasn't meant to turn into an occasional series, I've just been slack and not kept up with the regular postings. So, tio recap, we've had 'Ring Ring' by Abba and 'Hey Jude' by The Beatles. Next up it's...

'Paradise City' - Guns 'N' Roses (1989)

Oh yes. Up until this point it had been mainstream pop stuff all the way, apart from perhaps Bon Jovi's Slippery When Wet (but we'll not talk about that...), but once I heard G 'N' R's mighty 1989 single and subsequently purchased Appetite For Destruction, The Rock had well and truly entered my life for the first time - and it has yet to leave. OK, so there are better cuts than this on the album ('Welcome To The Jungle', 'Sweet Child O' Mine' and, the best of the bunch, 'Rocket Queen'), but this is what inspired me to buy it in the first place. Appetite For Destruction was all about smack, whisky and women - lean and pretty darn mean. By the time of the messy Use Your Illusion double LP, it sounded as though Axl was floundering around in a blizzard of cocaine - waistbands were larger, egos were larger still, and the upshot was perhaps the most spectacularly pompous rock ballad ever, 'November Rain', weighing in at nine minutes in length and accompanied by a video boasting the iconic image of Slash playing his solo outside a white church in the middle of the desert. Overall, though, neither I nor II came close to Appetite For Destruction.

Which is why Axl sensibly decided to focus on that at last year's Leeds Festival headline gig. His rag-tag band of musical gypsies might have looked utterly unfamiliar to the audience and each other, but they didn't half dish out the classics with some gusto. Everyone was at least interested, and I mean EVERYONE. ...And You Will Know Us By The Trail Of Dead cut their set short so they didn't miss the show, and the following night The Breeders' Kim Deal was excitedly asking her audience what it'd been like to witness the G 'N' R freakshow in the flesh. And, fittingly, as far as I remember 'Paradise City' signalled the end of a night that it felt I'd been waiting around 13 years for. Not to be forgotten in a hurry.

Inspired a love of: proper heavy rock and metal, Black Sabbath, Queens Of The Stone Age, Deftones, Fu Manchu, Led Zeppelin, Rage Against The Machine, Monster Magnet, Nebula, System Of A Down, Faith No More, Nine Inch Nails, Tool, Audioslave, Marilyn Manson