Guns N’ Roses3Arena, Dublin★★★★★For nearly a quarter of a century Guns N’ Roses fans waited and pondered if the original line-up would ever stage a reunion. Such was the enmity between singer Axl Rose and guitarist Slash that many presumed it would not happen. “Not in this lifetime,” Rose said in response to this inevitable question in 2012. The band’s reunion tour was somewhat ironically called Not in This Lifetime. It made nearly $600 million playing to more than 4.8 million people. Among them were the 80,000 fans who attended the Slane Castle gig in May 2017. This was an altogether more polished and professional performance than the addled mess from 1992 when they were the biggest band in the world. They played another concert in Ireland at Marlay Park in June 2022, this time to 40,000 fans. Last night they played the 3Arena, which has a capacity of 13,000 fans. They were infamously late for the Slane show in 1992 and even more infamously in 2010 when the concert had to be stopped twice and didn’t finish until the early hours because Axl Rose hadn’t turned up in time. The present incarnation of Guns N’ Roses is nothing if not punctual. The clock hadn’t even hit the appointed time of 8pm when the spinning vortex video began playing on the big screen and then it was time for the staccato guitar intro to Welcome to the Jungle. The band blasted through a medley of standards, some blue (Bad Obsession), some borrowed (Paul McCartney’s Live and Let Die being one of them), and many from their own catalogue (It’s So Easy, Mr Brownstone, Estranged, You Could Be Mine). The presence of Slash and Duff McKagan has made Chinese Democracy, from the 2008 album from which they were absent, sound like a Guns N’ Roses cover. On and on it rolled. You are constantly reminded how good they were back in the day and how there are no successors. Where are the contemporary great rock bands?And so it continued, Axl Rose jumping up and down on a raised dais, covering every foot of the stage, holding those high notes just when you think he can’t. Duff McKagan, the band’s resident Irishman whose ancestors came from Co Cork, did a punkish version of Thin Lizzy’s Thunder and Lightning. The band sound tight as a submarine door and so they should be. They have been hawking this greatest hits tour and then some under different guises since their reunion. Familiarity breeds, if not contempt, scepticism. The novelty of this most storied of bands coming out of self-imposed retirement has worn off and what’s left are the hard-core fans. The crowd were on their feet for Sweet Child O’ Mine and then November Rain, one of those piano ballads that diehard rock fans scoffed at when it first came out, but it has weathered well. Nightrain and Paradise City rounded off a set that last two hours and 45 minutes without an encore. It is hard to fault the band’s back catalogue or their application, but the elephant in the room – more like a giant woolly mammoth growing year by year – is the absence of new material.The 3Arena set has just two new songs, the piano ballad Nothin’, which builds and builds to a thunderous Slash guitar solo, and another song which Axl Rose unhelpfully introduced as a new song, but gave no title. Answers on a postcard from any Guns N’ Roses aficionados out there. The song had a dystopian backdrop of the Statue of Liberty – maybe it’s a song about the current state of America. But even the new material that Guns N’ Roses played is recycled stuff from Chinese Democracy, which did not include the original line-up. Incredibly, the last original material from the original band was from the early 1990s. The world doesn’t need another Guns N’ Roses world tour – it needs a new Guns N’ Roses album. Get back in the studio, lads, before it is too late.