A decade ago, self-styled druggy outlaws Guns N’ Roses were American rock’s Public Enemy Number One. The singer W. Axl Rose, a dainty little redhead with a fondness for skipping around in tight undershorts, became an unlikely antihero to anti-authority knuckleheads everywhere after the band’s debut album, Appetite for Destruction, sold 20 million copies.

One of rock’s great soap operas, the Guns have been locked in an almost constant round of ugly rumours and creative stasis since Rose fell out with the group’s guitarist, Slash, in the mid 1990s. The reclusive singer has kept the band name alive with interminable recording sessions for a semi-mythic new album, Chinese Democracy, and even played a clutch of well-received shows last year. But Rose has long been eclipsed by the poster boys of grunge, gangsta rap and nu-metal as patron saint of misfit suburban rage. Nowadays, his high-maintenance tantrums look almost quaintly nostalgic.

Welcome to the Videos is a sumptuous banquet of bad hair days that works as both a fascinating historical document and guilty pleasure. Significantly, the songwriting quality declines steeply as the budgets bloat. Early singles such as the vaulting pop-metal classic Sweet Child O’Mine and the surprisingly tender country-rock serenade Patience are simple performance affairs. But by the time epic blow-outs such as Estranged heave into view, it is clear that both egos and costs are spiralling out of control.

The lack of extras on the video compilation is a minor annoyance. But the ultra-basic format of the live DVDs, recorded at Tokyo’s Big Egg Dome in February 1992, just feels cheap, especially as a three-hour set is inexplicably stretched across two discs when one would clearly suffice. At the time Guns N’ Roses were one of the planet’s most exciting live acts, but this rudimentary small-screen concert diminishes them into merely competent professionals, with Rose reading lyrics from an autocue and modelling more preposterous costume changes than Beyoncé.

Though Slash confirms his reputation as an exemplary and versatile virtuoso, the inclusion of dreary drum solos and waffly backstage banter all increase the sense of barrel bottoms being scraped for shameless cash-in purposes. //

DVD extras None

Stephen Dalton

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