Slash – Festival Hall

It’s taken the best part of two decades but Slash is going the right way about saving the legacy of Guns N Roses. The bad blood, the constant delays in recording, the side projects and the general air of chaos that surrounded so much of the bands post-Illusion news has tended to obscure the fact that the main reason GnR  rose to the heights they did was that they were a great hard rock n’ roll band.

And inherent in any genuinely great hard rock band is a great hard rock guitarist.

Slash is a great hard rock guitarist.

Tonights show managed to draw together songs from four phases of Slash’s career – Guns n Roses, Slash’s Snakepit, Velvet Revolver and his recently released “solo” album in a show that was really a showcase for his playing and the power of a really good hard rock band in full flight.

The best thing about the show was that the stage was a wanker-free zone. Slash himself is a no-nonsense guitar player – he plays some really tasty lead rock guitar but he does it as a band member not as a band leader. He plays to the song and although for many in the audience he is a “guitar hero” he’s really just a great rock guitar player playing in a great rock band.

In some ways Myles Kennedy is the glue that holds this together. Both Guns N Roses and Velvet Revolver had really distinctive lead singers who drew a lot of attention. Slash’s solo album by definition had a big focus on the singers on each song whether they were Iggy Pop, Ozzy Osbourne, Andrew Stockdale, Ian Asbury or even Fergie. Kennedy then, has the role of filling the shoes of Axl Rose and Scott Weiland as well as making a bunch of songs from Snakepit and the solo album his own.

He does a brilliant job. Performing songs like Sweet Child, Paradise City and Civil War could easily have gone very wrong and ended up sounding like a GnR covers band but to his credit Kennedy gets it just right. He avoids mimicking Rose but equally doesn’t try too hard to change the phrasing and the intent of the songs to make them his own, and by so doing losing the crowd along the way.

And he manages to do all this without needing to try and attract too much attention by posing or coming across as too much of a rock star. He lets his singing speak for itself.

The rest of the band simply get the job done. Bobby Schneck (guitar), Tony Montana (bass) and Brent Fitz (drums) don’t steal centre stage from Kennedy or Slash, but in the tradition of great bands they are rock solid contributors.

The selections from the solo album are smart – they don’t try to replicate the more iconic singers on the album and by avoiding that, those songs become identified with this band.

There’s no pyrotechnics, no big sets and no ‘visual extravaganza’ – just a very good band playing great rock n’ fn’ roll. That’s a good way to spend a night out.

Setlist
Ghost
Mean Bone (Slash’s Snakepit)
Night Train (Guns ‘N’ Roses)
Sucker Train Blues (Velvet Revolver)
Back From Cali
Beggars And Hangers-On (Slash’s Snakepit)
Civil War (Guns ‘N’ Roses)
Rocket Queen (Guns ‘N’ Roses)
Fall To Pieces (Velvet Revolver)
Dirty Little Thing (Velvet Revolver)
Nothing To Say
Starlight
Watch This (instrumental)
Slash solo
The Godfather theme
Sweet Child O’ Mine (Guns ‘N’ Roses)
Slither (Velvet Revolver)

Encore
By The Sword
Paradise City (Guns ‘N’ Roses)