Axl Rose and the gang return, trimmed down a little, and all the better for it, to close the first night of Rockville 2026 with a bang.
“Right now you’re all goin’, ‘We paid for this?!’” A flash of mischief flickers across Axl Rose’s face. As Thursday night’s Welcome To Rockville headliners barrel out of incendiary opener Welcome To The Jungle and into a rendition of Bad Obsession packing roughly the same absurdly overblown swagger as a T-Rex with leather trousers on, Guns N’ Roses’ frontman allows himself a wry smile.
Almost exactly a decade ago, when Axl, Slash and Duff McKagan first announced they’d be getting the band back together, the idea of ‘the original’ Guns N’ Roses closing Thursday night in Daytona with a scheduled three-and-a-half hours in front of 50,000-odd fans would’ve set hearts racing. Ten years later, not so much. Arriving just a few minutes late tonight, the most dangerous band in the world don’t have fans waiting around half as much these days. But their in-song timekeeping, appetite for self-indulgence and struggles with high notes have recently left much to be desired.
Acknowledging and owning those shortcomings makes a hell of a difference, though. Trimming the fat, rather than last summer’s wildly overbloated 30-song setlist, Rockville gets 24 tracks this evening, coming in at just over 150 minutes. It's still a lot of Guns, but there’s far less fucking about to stall momentum.
Axl is in playfully sassy form throughout. After a fiery Live And Let Die, a Wings classic GN’R wholly hijacked, he smirks acknowledgement to the original songwriter: “I remember all the way back to when Paul [McCartney] and I didn’t write that together…” And after disappearing for the extended instrumental outro of Double Talkin’ Jive, he wanders back with a spring in his step and a devilish grin. “I apologise if I was gone all too long. You guys got me so excited, I had to go rub one out…”
An layer of extra significance looms over Daytona, too. In 2022, when they were first booked to headline Rockville, GN’R were rained out by heavy thunderstorms. There’s lost time to be made up and all the stops are pulled out. A setlist with songs the calibre of Mr Brownstone, It’s So Easy, Sweet Child O’ Mine and November Rain sprinkled throughout is, frankly, never going to suck.
The selection of cover versions is nicely varied, too, with their pitchy take on Black Sabbath’s Never Say Die reprised from last summer, Slash breaking out the pedal-steel for Jimmy Webb’s Wichita Lineman and a Duff-led take on Misfits’ Attitude making up for the always-overwrought Knockin’ On Heaven’s Door. Moments of dazzling magic are sprinkled on generously, like the legendary guitarist dropping a few seconds of Jimi Hendrix’s Voodoo Child at the end of Civil War.
Is it a perfect set? Absolutely not. Although Axl’s delivery is a cut above where it has been recently, the frontman cannot truly begin to roll back four decades of wear and tear. The pacing remains agonisingly leisurely at points, with the sense lingering that new drummer Isaac Carpenter is never able to properly cut loose. And cutting another hour from their set time would likely improve matters in the short and longer term, adding urgency and taking less toll on Axl’s throat.
But, still, this is Guns N’ fucking Roses. From the bruisers beating each other up down the front, to the bourgeoisie sipping cocktails in the Owners Club grandstand, and even a couple of off-duty cops perched with arms around each other's shoulders on top of a portacabin, absolutely everyone is dialled in for their big moments. And as a juggernaut Nightrain careers into the jubilant Paradise City, sending this huge audience off into the heat of the night, they do not come bigger than that.
