Desert storm... Dubai and my show of lifetime
IT was the gig I’d waited pretty much my whole life to see. Too young to go to Slane in 1992, I’ve spent the 25 years since hearing about what an amazing performance Guns N’ Roses provided.
In the intervening years, I’ve seen Axl, Slash and Duff all perform with other bands — one memorable night watching Velvet Revolver in The Olympia particularly springs to mind — but I’d never seen them all together.
Sitting with my cousin in a bar in his ex-pat home of Dubai in November, he mentioned that Guns N’ Roses would be playing there in March.
By this stage, there’d been rumours that they were planning an Irish gig, but nothing had been confirmed.
After I returned home, Slane was announced and I snapped up my tickets. But the thoughts of waiting five months — and, let’s face it, when Axl is involved, anything can happen in the intervening time — didn’t appeal. So I looked up flights to Dubai, booked them and set off in March.
The gig was in the Autism Rocks Arena on the outskirts of Dubai, pretty much in the middle of nowhere beside an outlet mall with one entrance and exit. For anyone who ever faced the trauma of getting to and from Slane in the early2000s — the bus journey home after Oasis still haunts me — the scene looked all too familiar.
Having jumped out of our transport 5km from the stadium, we joined the hordes of fans traipsing down the side of a motorway. We spent an hour climbing over sand dunes, through wire fences and across packed car parks before eventually getting to the stadium at bang on 9pm, the announced stage time for the band. As we rounded the corner to our entrance gate, my heart sank when I saw the queue to get in, but I appeased myself with the thought that there was no way Axl would be on time.
But as the intro to It’s So Easy burst out from the speakers at 9.01pm, I was proven sadly wrong.
We ended up outside for this and the next two songs — Mr Brownstone and Chinese Democracy — but managed to burst into the stadium just as the memorable first bars of Welcome To The Jungle sent the crowd into a frenzy.
The next two hours and thirty minutes were an absolute lesson in how to work a crowd. The last time I saw Axl was in the RDS in 2006, the corn-row era, when he spent more time backstage than he did out front. At one point, the two guitarists who were left to hold the fort while he took his breathers played a version of Christina Aguilera’s Beautiful — not at all what fans were there to hear.
THIS, however, was the complete opposite. As they worked through their extensive back catalogue of favourites such as You Could Be Mine, Civil War — which featured an incredible Voodoo Child solo from Slash — Sweet Child O’ Mine, Nightrain and, my personal favourite, Live And Let Die, Axl whipped the crowd into an absolute frenzy.
The chemistry between him and Slash is the reason millions of fans worldwide have willed this reunion to happen and it really doesn’t disappoint.
As well as all their own hits, they featured songs by Nino Rota and The Who, finishing with a rollicking, booming Paradise City.
Sitting in traffic for three hours on the way home left us plenty of time to reflect on what we had just seen and my overriding thought was that I couldn’t wait until May 27. Like the proverbial buses, you wait ages for one GNR gig, then two come along at once.
Just don’t expect Axl to be late...