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most of the other songs, still a hard hitting rocker but allowing the band to show the range of styles you can fit inside the rock genre. Another big song follows it, the epic Paradise City, a rock anthem if ever there was one. A slower build up, full harmonies from all concerned, all the time tension building until a police whistle signals the time to unleash and all hell breaks loose musically. Another slice of the dark side of their Hollywood slum roots and set to one of the most easily identified rock songs ever.

My Michelle exposes the punk roots of the likes of bassist Duff McKagan, a rock verse and a punk chorus hot wired into a biting and sinister song of a young girl trapped in a dark and lonely place. Sweet Child O `Mine, what can I say, thee classic rock ballad, fast enough to stand apart from the slushy outpourings of most bands efforts at this type of song and one of the all time great guitar riffs. This song sees Axl in unusually reflective mood extolling his feelings for the love of his life. Your Crazy flips the mood over into full on a punk meets rock thrash out, these two songs showing the two extremes of the bands dynamic range.

The album does contain a lot of swearing, but that's not nearly as shocking in this day and age as it was when this was released, but the language is the language of their world and does nt seem to be put in for shock value, its just the way they talk, not contrived or calculated just the way it is. The album does sound as fresh today as it did when it first hit the streets back in 1987. Musically this is the bastard child of Hanoi Rocks, a much underrated band of the early eighties, and Axl himself has admitted that if Hanoi Rocks had not split then there would not have been a market for G N`R. It contains similar threads to bands such as Faster Pussycat, L.A. Guns and when they let the groove take over, Bang Tango but somehow managed to stand on the shoulders of these temporary giants and go the distance. G N`R may have had their day but at least you have a great album to remember them by, not to mention Slash and Duffs new art attack Velvet Revolver.

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