Guns N' Roses are among the most famous hard rock bands ever. Their albums have sold more than 100 million copies worldwide, and some of their songs, such as 'Paradise City', 'November Rain' and Welcome to the Jungle, 'Don't Cry", are among the most popular and timeless anthems of rock music.
That is why the band is in Greece on Saturday, July 22, at the Olympic Stadium in Athens, with their original line-up. This is undoubtedly one of the top events of this year's concert summer.
Axl Rose, the bad boy of rock, with the unique voice, who raised generations with his performances and became a global musical icon, together with the one and only Slash on guitar and Duff McKagan on bass, will take the stage ready to prove that there are some musical stories that never fade.
Their resilience, moreover, has been proven dozens of times since the mid-80s, when they began their musical journey, until today. It's mainly due to the quality and uniqueness of their music, which from the very beginning almost deftly juggled between hard rock tracks and soulful electric ballads.
It is no coincidence that they influenced many later musicians.
Their momentum was evident from their very first album, Appetite for Destruction (1987), which thrilled with its songs, shocked with its hard-hitting cover art, and went down in history as "the best-selling debut album in the US", i.e. 28 million copies sold!
Over the next few years their fame would spread across the world, MTV would play their tracks constantly, resulting in Axl, with his long crimson mane, becoming the object of lust for millions of teenage girls who slept with his posters.
Nevertheless, the addiction of the band members to drugs, combined with the unrestrained and sometimes violent character of Axl Rose had begun to create significant tremors in its foundations.
Nevertheless, the albums 'Use Your Illusion I' and 'Use Your Illusion II' which followed in 1991 proved to be full of musical treasures such as 'November Rain', 'Coma', written by Slash during his addiction to heroin, but also the arrangement of the legendary "Knocking on Heaven's Door" by Bob Dylan.
In the context of the large, successful world tour that followed this release, the band gave, in May 1993, their first concert on Greek soil. They returned several years later, in July 2006, entertaining the Greek fans for two whole hours!
It was on that same tour that the darkest page in their concert history was written when Axl, after assaulting an audience member who was filming the concert in St. Louis, Missouri, left the stage resulting in a backlash that led to dozens of people being injured.
Another big blow came in 1996 when Slash, after intense disputes with Axl, left the group to be followed by other departures of its members creating an image of disintegration.
And while in the following years everything showed that the gap between the two musicians was unbridgeable, in 2015 Guns n' Roses were reborn from their ashes proving that they were... too tough to die.
The Guns N' Roses concert at the Olympic Stadium in Athens will be opened by the New Yorkers The Last Internationale, who have shared the stage with important artists including Robert Plant, Neil Young, The Who, Kings of Leon, Tom Morello, etc.
Tickets can be purchased from Ticketmaster.
READ MORE: Rock in Athens 85: The story of the FIRST rock festival in Greece - See video and photos.
