30 March 1989
In my 1989 small child worldview, bigger boys liked Guns N’ Roses, the way they liked A Nightmare On Elm Street and whatever Death Wish video they somehow got away with renting. (I tried taking out the nasty Dirty Harry sequel The Dead Pool, in which Guns N’ Roses briefly appear, but the video store rang my parents.) I heard ‘Paradise City’ on the Beat Box on Sunday mornings and The Hotline in the evenings while I was doing my homework, and on the strength of that I took Guns N’ Roses for another US ’80s hair metal band, like Poison or even Bon Jovi but with more street cred and shock value. I just wasn’t into hard rock then, and I’m still not now. The Dead Pool is a terrible movie too, by the way.
I hadn’t realised that ‘Paradise City’ had got to number one in Ireland and top ten in the UK. I suspect this was due to what also attracted the bigger boys: the band’s outlaw glamour and air of genuine debauchery, plus the sheer coolness of being called Slash, Axl, Izzy and Duff. (No one ever really cared for whatever drummer was in situ.) As for the song, ‘Paradise City’ has a catchy chorus and some enjoyable flourishes. The whistle is inspired! The thrash metal verses are dumb fun. I also like Axl Rose’s edgy couplet about being “strapped in the chair of the city gas chamber / Why I’m here I can’t quite remember”. Otherwise, though, it’s a fairly routine hard rock track that’s almost seven minutes long but without seven minutes’ worth of stuff to interest me. Those bigger boys were all eejits anyway.
