WITH Guns N' Roses now apparently back on speaking terms and booked for a series of reunion dates, it's time to take a refresher course in GN'R history with this mostly excellent BBC documentary screening at 10pm tonight on BBC Four.
Packed with archive footage and interview clips, Jon Brewer's doc focuses heavily on the early LA-based years of Guns as recalled by Slash's best buddy Marc Canter, the band's former manager/den mother Vicky Hamilton and Geffen A&R man Tom Zutaut.
Coverage of the post-Appetite For Destruction period concentrates on the chaos rather than probing behind the music: still, there are some hilarious/harrowing anecdotes snatched from the blur of egos, arguments, lawsuits, ODs and riots.
Drummers Steven Adler and Matt Sorum provide entertainingly candid contemporary talking head commentary and, while there's not much here that hardcore fans won't already know – besides the bizarre tidbit that Axl once pondered purchasing his own private army, perhaps – TMDBITW still makes an ideal appetiser for the reunified band's imminent bout of (self-?) destruction.
