“Sweet Child o’ Mine” went to number one in the United States and across the globe. What’s more, the album was jam-packed with catchy pop hits. The guitars were loud, the drums were loud, the whole thing was deafening, brash and overdone. Threatening, seedy and very rude, it was everything that teenage boys wanted out of music. That band’s name was Guns N’ Roses and the record they made was Appetite for Destruction, a colossal blastwave of rock’n’roll that seemed to wake the world from its mid-80s, Huey Lewis-induced torpor. But one band went on to eclipse them all, releasing a debut record 30 years ago so breathtaking, so extraordinary and so brilliantly sordid that, at a stroke, it made the others look pale by comparison. Bands like Poison and Mötley Crüe-yes, those are umlauts-were wowing the LA crowds with their tight trousers and squealing guitars, spending almost as much money on hairspray as on drink.
The Los Angeles poodle rock circuit was a pretty crowded scene back in the late 1980s.
