Karl Puschmann

In their heyday Guns N’ Roses had a legendary appetite for destruction. They trashed hotel rooms, sent concert crowds rioting after keeping them waiting for hours and drank and drugged themselves into oblivion. They were wild times. They couldn’t last

s the years rolled by all the original members left — either fired or frustrated by the band’s enigmatic frontman W. Axl Rose.

“If you’d asked me five years ago, ‘ do you think the guys will ever get back together?’, you wouldn’t have put money on it,” concert promoter Paul Dainty says down the line from Sydney.

As the man bringing the freshly reformed and ( mostly) original lineup of one of rock’s greatest bands to New Zealand, Dainty has now put a lot of money on it.

The band, which has Rose, guitarist Slash and bassist Duff McKagan performing together for the first time since 1993, will play two shows in Auckland and Wellington over Waitangi Weekend next year. Dainty says those wild reputations aren’t causing him any concern.

“If you look back we were probably all party animals or whatever in our 20s,” he says. “But you get older and mature and it’s no different for artists.

“Axl’s always had a reputation for being onstage late. That’s part of the mystique and persona of Axl Rose. He’s a very charismatic rock star. But the band’s just done 25 stadium shows in North America and they’ve been onstage on time. There hasn’t been one issue.”

This will come as massive relief to Gunners fans who stared at Vector Arena’s empty stage for hours until Rose finally appeared with his faux Guns N’ Roses line- up just before midnight back in 2007. That kind of shoddy timekeeping may fly in the city, but out in the suburbs