Guns N Roses - Use Your Illusions 1

Of the millions of albums which have been recorded, only 15 can make it into The Lucy Museum of Musicians who deserve entry to Lucy's Museum of Musician's and at number 2 we have Use Your Illusions 1 by Gun's N Roses.

On arriving back home in September 1991 with my copy of Nirvana's Nevermind i thought it would be a long time until anything better would come along to top it but as it turned out, i had to wait a week because Use your Illusions 1 & 2 was released at midnight the following weekend.
I always knew it was going to be good because back then HMV only did the Midnight opening for a few of the very biggest and best and there i was stood outside the record shop on a chilly September night wearing a pair of jeans with rips in the knees and a green flight jacket along with 20 other rather more grubbier looking GnR fans.
To be honest, i assumed that this would easily be my top album but of the 16 songs on it i skip over two and a half, Live and Let Die and The Garden as well as the first 3 minutes or so of November Rain until Slash plugs in his Les Gibson and for me Gun N Roses were all about Slash, the coolest man ever to pluck a guitar string and knock out a guitar riff so sharp it threatens eyeballs whenever it comes on the radio.
It would be easy for me to just bang on about Slash now but the sum of Gun N Roses parts made the complete package of the kind of wild Rock Stars we would all like to think we would be soaking their cornflakes in Jack Daniels, knocking seven bells out of each other while smoking 120 Benson & Hedges and still manage to put on a show before collapsing off stage into their own sick.
What Use Your Illusions 1 had was some very up tempo songs such as Right Next Door To Hell, Double Talkin' Jive and the frantic Garden of Eden but also some rock ballads which still have Slash wailing away which proved that soppy ballad's can still include a kick arse guitar solo like in November Rain and i can always appreciate a hunky man in tight leather trousers taking off his shirt and climbing onto a piano to give us a solo.
Use Your Illusions 2 had some amazing songs (Civil war, You Could Be Mine, Knockin' on Heavens Door) but never landed quite as well as UYI 1 and the double album was the last proper Guns N Roses offering with the original line up although they put out the Spaghetti Incident full of 70s punk songs and named after an infamous Mötley Crüe groupie encounter...ask your parents.
They did implode in acrimony not long after and although Axel Rose continued to plow his own furrow, without Slash it was never going to be the same and anyone who has heard Chinese Democracy will agree but between 1987 and their split in 1995, Guns N Roses were always drunk, mostly high, generally unkempt and smelling strongly of alcohol and their own vomit which is just how rock stars should be.