Greatest Hits

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This intelligent, insistently melodic song opens with mellow electric guitars and piano, and Axl Rose vocalising in the reverb-soaked distance. The title track opens the album with a minute of distant, pounding drums and dissonant guitars before breaking into an unabashedly industrial riff. Izzy Stradlin’s lead vocal is a chilling industrial hum, but you still have the slicing guitar licks and restless energy needed for a bona fide hard rock stomper. The title alludes to Rose’s 1990 fracas with a female neighbour at his luxury condominium block, after which he was arrested and then quickly released.

His performance proved inimitable, both live and in the studio, and thus “You Could Be Mine” captured the frontman at his most volatile. On an album that would flirt with everything from folk to prog, Rose and co wisely got everybody on board with a burst of old-school aggro. Izzy takes a rare crack at lead guitar on the first half of the first solo, laying down taut blues licks before Slash ignites his fretboard with one of the most heroic outro solos this side of Led Zeppelin.That narrative quickly crumbles upon hearing “Perfect Crime,” the speed-metal firecracker off Use Your Illusion I that roars to life with one of Slash’s most combustible riffs and Rose’s feral banshee wail. Another carry over from their Hollywood Rose days, it surfaced as the third track on the self-released Live ? The band literally almost derails in the chorus before salvaging the rhythm and captivating listeners for the song’s entirety. GN’R needed a banger to open the first volume of their simultaneously released third and fourth albums, and this throbbing punk rocker about hard times and bad people more than fitted the bill.

Ahead lay darkly humorous lyrics about madness and violence, Rose drawing on his revulsion for JD Salinger’s titular book, and the pernicious effect Rose thought it could have on weaker-minded souls.But muscular riffs and vocal hooks alone do not make a GN’R classic: the most vaunted songs in the band’s catalog create a palpable sense of drama and unpredictability, the feeling that the track could implode at any moment. Once he played it in front of his bandmates, it was the first step towards the 80s’ biggest rock’n’roll banger. The crowd noise, overdubbed on to the EP’s tracks to excuse the band’s own amateurish production, was lifted from recordings of the 1978 Texxas Jam festival, headlined by none other than a zonked-out Aerosmith and with Ted Nugent and Van Halen also on the bill.