KEY POINTS:
Guns N'Roses are set to release their first album of new material for 17 years. But with their troubled singer promising "something different', can the most expensive record ever made live up to the hype, asks Luke Bainbridge?<
It used to be called the "most expensive album never made' and many of reclusive Axl Rose's fans had long given up hope of it ever seeing the light of day, but the title track of Guns N'Roses' new album, Chinese Democracy, was finally released to radio last week. The album will be released on November 24, after a wait of 17 years.
Chinese Democracy will be Guns N'Roses' sixth studio album and their first album of original material since the simultaneous release of Use Your Illusion I and II in September 1991. The album may be released under the name Guns N'Roses, but frontman Rose is now the only remaining original member of the group, which played in Auckland last year, and this is very much his project.
William Bruce Rose Jr had a troubled childhood growing up in Lafayette, Indiana. After his real father, William Rose Sr, left when he was still a toddler, his mother Sharon married Stephen Bailey, changing young William's surname at the same time, and he grew up thinking Stephen Bailey was his biological father.
When he discovered the truth at 17, he reverted to his father's surname of Rose, but shortened William to W. He later, after regression therapy, claimed he was sexually abused as a two-year-old by his biological father.
He also said he was physically abused by his stepfather, as were his two younger half-siblings.
The teenage Rose was regularly in trouble and left for Los Angeles when he was 17. He played in several bands with schoolfriend Jeffrey Isbell, aka Izzy Stradlin, over the next few years until they settled on the classic Guns N'Roses line-up of Rose (vocals), Saul Hudson, aka Slash, (lead guitar), Stradlin (rhythm guitar), Duff McKagan (bass) and Steven Adler (drums).
The band signed to Geffen in 1986 and released their debut album, Appetite for Destruction, on July 21 1987. The success of singles Sweet Child O' Mine and Paradise City made them megastars. The album went on to sell more than 25 million copies worldwide and remains the 11th biggest selling album of all time in the US.
Born out of the big-haired Sunset Strip scene of the mid-eighties, the hard-drinking, hard-living bad boys went on to outsell their peers and transcend rock music. Even then, although he had a tattoo of the skeleton faces of the band, the young Rose stood slightly apart from them. "I would say he seemed separate from everyone, bandmates included," says Paul Elliott, a rock journalist who interviewed the band several times in their early years. "He chose his words very carefully and was clearly thinking about what he was saying and doing, whereas everybody else was running around trying to get as loaded as possible."
The band's second album, G N'R Lies, was released in 1988, but all was not well. In 1990, Adler was sacked for drug abuse and Stradlin left the following year, tired of Rose's habit of keeping the audience waiting for two hours before shows.
Following the success of Use Your Illusion (the two albums debuted at numbers 1 and 2 in the US), and a stop-gap covers compilation, The Spaghetti Incident, Slash wanted to make a "simple, kick-ass, hard rock record". But Rose was determined to experiment with new sounds. Slash was distraught after Rose rejected his new songs and then in 1994 recruited another guitarist - Paul Huge from Rose's hometown Lafayette - without telling him. "I was suicidal," said Slash. "If I had a gun with me at the time I probably would have done myself in." Slash left late in 1996, and original bassist McKagan left in 1998, meaning Rose has been the only original member for a decade now.
After the death of his mother in 1996, Rose became increasingly reclusive. He was rarely spotted outside his Malibu home, as rumours circulated about the rising cost of his endless nocturnal rehearsing and recording stints. British producer Youth, who has worked with everyone from U2 to Crowded House, is one of the few people involved in Chinese Democracy who has spoken about the experience, after several stints working with Rose in 1998 and 1999.
"I went to his house and we started writing songs, strumming guitars in the kitchen. That was a major breakthrough because it got him singing again, which he hadn't done for a long time."
When Youth told Rose he wanted to record next time he came over, he was told: "You're pushing me too fast", so he reluctantly pulled out. "Sadly, because I think he's one of the last great showmen of rock, incredibly committed and passionate."
Rose hired two new musicians - Buckethead, a guitarist so called because he performs with a KFC bucket on his head, and drummer Bryan "Brain" Mantia - and not for the first or last time, began to re-record the album.
The picture that emerges is of Rose chasing his tail, working his way through a procession of musicians, producers and therapists in an endless search for musical direction. "His world is very insular," said Doug Goldstein, his manager at the time. "He doesn't like very many people."
"So many times, I have come down [to the studio] and I had no idea that I was going to be able to," Rose revealed to Rolling Stone magazine in 1999. "If you are working with issues that depressed the crap out of you, how do you know you can express it?"
The monthly tab for the recording was said to be around $250,000.
Every so often, there would be rumours of a release date, but in 2004 his record label finally lost patience.
"Having exceeded all budgeted and approved recording costs by millions of dollars," said the label in February 2004, "it is Mr Rose's obligation to fund and complete the album, not Geffen's."
As with every year, there were rumours earlier this year that 2008 would finally see the release of Chinese Democracy .
Then, in March, US softdrink brand Dr Pepper pledged a free can to every American - apart from ex-guitarists Slash and Buckethead - if it was released this year. Rose was delighted, posting on the band website that "as some of Buckethead's performances are on our album, I'll share my Dr Pepper with him".
Rose, however, has insisted that part of the reason for Chinese Democracy's ridiculously long gestation period is that he was striving for something new. "It's a very complex record. I'm trying to do something different," he said in 2006. "Some of the arrangements are kind of like Queen. Some people are going to say, 'It doesn't sound like Guns N'Roses'."
The thing is, apart from the title track, the leaked tracks do sound like Guns N'Roses. Or certainly a lot more like Guns N'Roses than Queen. In 1999, the band contributed the song Oh my God to the soundtrack of End of Days, which indicated that the album was heading in an industrial, Nine Inch Nails direction. But others, such as Catcher in the Rye and Madagascar, are more straightforward rockers, not far removed from material on Use Your Illusion. Which wouldn't displease many of Rose's fans. Could it be that Rose has spent millions on the new Guns N'Roses purely to get them to sound like the cheap garage rock band they were originally?
The musical landscape has changed since the last Guns studio album. But music is a cyclical beast and it could be that Rose has picked a very good time to return. The success of Guitar Hero - the videogame that allows users to play along with classic guitar tracks such as Sweet Child O'Mine - and the acclaim that has greeted the return of fellow unreconstructed rockers AC/DC and Metallica, suggest there's still an appetite for Rose and his ring-ins.
Rose is now managed by Irving Azoff and Andy Gould, who can be forgiven a little hyperbole, having finally got Rose to relinquish Chinese Democracy.
"When they asked Michelangelo to paint the Sistine Chapel, they didn't say, 'Can you do it in the fourth quarter?"' said Gould. "Great art sometimes takes time."
LOWDOWN
Who: Axl Rose
Born William Bruce Rose Jr on 6 February 1962 in Lafayette, Indiana. In 1990, he married Erin Everly, daughter of Don Everly and the inspiration for the band's Sweet Child O'Mine single, but the couple split within a month.
Best of times: Guns N'Roses have sold more than 90 million albums worldwide.
Worst of times: Rose claims that he was sexually abused by his biological father as a toddler and later, with his half-brother and half-sister, physically abused by his stepfather.
What he says: "I'm late to everything. I've always wanted to have it written in my will that when I die, the coffin shows up a half-hour late and says on the side, like in gold, 'Sorry I'm late'."
What others say: "I feel sorry for him sometimes, if only because he's such a tough act to be, he's in such a funny place because no one will really understand him as much as he would probably like to be understood." - Former band mate Slash
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