100 Best Albums Of All Time

01 Welcome to the Jungle

02 It’s So Easy

03 Nightrain

04 Out ta Get Me

05 Mr. Brownstone

06 Paradise City

07 My Michelle

08 Think About You

09 Sweet Child o’ Mine

10 You’re Crazy

11 Anything Goes

12 Rocket Queen

1988 certainly needed them. From January through to the middle of June that year only three albums held the top position on the American album charts: the Dirty Dancing soundtrack, the self-titled debut from long-forgotten teen popette Tiffany, and George Michael’s Faith. When Guns N’ Roses debut album – the scabrous, searing Appetite for Destruction – arrived at the top of the pile after a year-long journey that had seen the group’s fortunes slowly improve via a grinding tour schedule, it marked a rebirth for rock & roll after a decade where the genre had been detached and diluted. One listen to Axl Rose, Guns N’ Roses’ inflammatory frontman, and all bets were off.

They were undoubtedly products of the ludicrous yet lucrative Los Angeles hard rock scene. All five band members – Rose, guitarists Slash (Saul Hudson) and Izzy Stradlin, bassist Duff McKagan and drummer Steve Adler – had (dyed) roots in the city’s dive clubs and dingy apartments. But there was no hair metal fantasy to the band’s songs, no wish fulfilment for impressionable teenagers. Rose was a small town kid who didn’t deal well with authority, and he channelled his rage into a condemnation of his surroundings. ‘If you want it you’re gonna bleed,’ he sings on the opening ‘Welcome to the Jungle’, and Appetite for Destruction is a record where everything comes with a price.

The lynchpin of the band’s sound was the interplay and versatility of the guitarists. Slash was the archetypal lead guitarist, and his solos have a dazzling brevity and just enough grit to offset the flamboyance, while Stradlin was a Keith Richards devotee who held the line. They were an enormously complementary pair, and they staffed the record’s 12 tracks with unexpected touches, such as the plangent 12-string guitar that repeatedly rises up in ‘Think About You’ or the turbo ’70s boogie of ‘Paradise City’.

With their five-piece line-up and palpable mix of hedonism and anti-social rancour, Guns N’ Roses drew comparisons to the Rolling Stones. The oft-made compliment was that they made rock & roll dangerous again, but if that’s the case then parts of Appetite for Destruction are as likely to encourage self-harm as a riot (and the touring for the album veered close to a few of those). Rose was writing off the LA scene before he got famous, and his cynicism has a tragic authenticity on the likes of ‘My Michelle’: ‘And this hotel wasn’t free/So party till your connection call/Honey I’ll return the key’.

Misogyny and self-loathing go hand in hand on Appetite for Destruction and it sounds like the only thing that was keeping the singer in line on these songs was the catharsis promised by his bandmates. Producer Mike Clink was an engineer making his production debut (a dalliance with Kiss frontman Paul Stanley as a possible producer had thankfully not eventuated), and the sound is rugged and authoritative. There’s the propulsive ‘Nightrain’, which does have enough cowbell, the high octane ‘Mr. Brownstone’ with its allusions to heroin use (‘I used to do a little but a little wouldn’t do’), and the frenzied ‘You’re Crazy’.

The album did have a ballad, but it was a typically early Guns N’ Roses idea of one. Introduced by a warm-up riff Slash used to play in the dressing room that he didn’t think was anywhere near special, ‘Sweet Child o’ Mine’ found a hint of hope in Rose’s operastrength yowl and a contemplative melody. It was a moment of mid-tempo respite on an album that became emblematic both to the lost boys and girls it was written about and the general public, going on to sell 28 million copies. In the future they’d exceed the drama, but the music was never as unfettered and essential as it was here.