Guns N’ Roses, Gary Clark Jr., Michael Monroe

London Tottenham Hotspur Stadium

While the supports burn bright, the headliners are a shadow of their former incendiary selves.

In what seems like a scant few minutes, Michael Monroe has traversed their sliver of the Spurs stage he and his band been allotted by the headliners, skipped past guitarist Steve Conte and climbed the side stage rigging before belting out the ever-effervescent ’78. Monroe and his band have 30 minutes and eight songs (more than the previous day, when logistics kept them off the stage completely) to stun an audience who have ambled in from the bar to see what the racket is.

And what a racket. A breathless half hour of raw, bloody-fingered rock’n’roll: Last Train To Tokyo, Ballad Of The Lower East Side, a thunderous take on Hanoi Rocks’ Malibu Beach Nightmare, and then one final, defiant call to arms with Dead, Jail or Rock ‘n’ Roll – the video for which, lest we forget, featured one impossibly younglooking Axl Rose. How the world has turned.

Gary Clark Jr. strolls on to the stage with the assuredness of a man blessed with the guitar chops of a young Stevie Ray Vaughan and the effortless cool of Let Love Rule-era Lenny Kravitz. It doesn’t seem to bother him though; his greatness sits lightly on his shoulders. Dressed like he’s just come from a GQ photo-shoot, he wears a fedora in a way that makes you think, mistakenly, that perhaps you should get one of those.

Clark Jr. has time for two songs fewer than Monroe, but that’s because his approach is a whole lot looser, and he knows how to make the spaces sing. That said, he and his band come out of the traps at a clip with the thrilling bounce of the Stax-sounding Ain’t Messin’ Round, his guitar solo making grown men drop plastic pint pots of cider, and sticks with his much lauded Blak And Blu album for the low, grinding Bright Lights. But it’s the driven jive of Gotta Get Into Something that eventually levels the place.

Something is wrong in the house of Axl. Not the DIY haircut or the pantomime boots, but he seems genuinely aggrieved at his inability to hit the right notes tonight. After the elongated Estranged he announces that he’s going to change the set-list. Which in practice means it’s going to be truncated. So within the short space of time from their Dublin show four days ago, the set has been reduced from almost three hours to two and a half, and tonight to just a little over two.

Which seems odd when only moments earlier he was hitting notes on Welcome To The Jungle that only a dog might hear. The evening’s unevenness is indicative of a show that swings from maddening lows to dizzying highs. Case in point: Civil War is very good indeed, but then crashes into a cover of Wichita Lineman that is so truly and utterly awful it’s like watching a pensioner being mugged and being unable to do anything about it.

Guns N’ Roses aren’t a gang any more, let alone the most dangerous band in the world. There seems to be little bonhomie in the band; Duff, Slash and Axl rarely acknowledge each other, and when they work their way through Velvet Revolver’s Slither you can only wonder at the hours of off-stage negotiation that might have taken. That said, Duff makes a decent fist of The Stooges’ I Wanna Be Your Dog, but then the band let the air out of their tyres with a strangely and deliberately leaden take on You’re Crazy, which is like putting a wheel clamp on a Bugatti.

Country superstar Carrie Underwood, one of Axl’s biggest fans – which is a matter of record and not just a throwaway line delivered from the stage – joins the band to encore on Sweet Child O’ Mine and Paradise City, her performance on the former spurring the usually recalcitrant Rose to admit that Carrie was “saving my ass”.

Which is Guns N’ Roses distilled tonight: a once great band falling over their own feet. Clouds open over the stadium as November Rain is dropped quietly from the set as GN’R and their audience dream of better days.