Guns ablazing?

It must have seemed like a cool move at the time, with the bonus that it was an easy way to get free publicity.

Seven months down the line, however, soft-drink company Dr Pepper's smug show of hip bravado in promising to give a free soda to everyone in America if Guns N'Roses' long-awaited Chinese Democracy album got released before the end of the year, may end up costing the company a pretty penny. Because, against all the odds, the fractious, deadline-dodging hard rock band finally got off its collective rear and announced that the album would indeed become fact rather than rumour next week. "We never thought this day would come," admitted Tony Jacobs, vice-president of marketing at Dr Pepper (though not, perhaps, for much longer).

To convince the sceptical, and frankly to indulge in a bit of self-promotion, the band have placed a digital clock on their official website, counting down the days, hours, minutes and, yes, seconds until the album's release.

DEATH METAL?

Doubtless, there are some fans whose computers will be permanently linked to the website, heavy metal fans being, as a rule, more stubborn in their devotion than the average punter. And hey, you get to hear the title track over and over again, so, given an infinite number of plays, you might eventually be able to make sense of what frontman (and sole surviving founder member) Axl Rose is jabbering on about.

It's not hard to see why Dr Pepper got caught out by this sudden and uncharacteristic burst of activity on the band's part. Chinese Democracy has been some 14 years in the making, and rumoured to be imminently appearing for most of that time. It had become something of a standing music-biz joke, akin to "when hell freezes over".

Nobody really expected it to see the light of day, especially since Rose had hired and fired so many musicians during its gestation that it would have surprised nobody if he had gone and fired himself, too. And when/if the album finally appears, it will be the first collection of new, original Guns N'Roses material since the two double-albums, Use Your Illusion I and II, were released on the same day in 1991 – a hiatus of almost Steely Dan proportions (they waited 20 years to follow up 1980's Gaucho).

NO SUCH THING AS QUITTING

But the Pepper people overlooked the inhuman stamina of heavy metal bands, who are the cockroaches of the music world: Unchanged since primitive times, and virtually impossible to kill.

Just look at Ozzy Osbourne, who's sustained as concerted a campaign of serious self-harm as seems humanly possible, yet still refuses to turn up his toes. It's this kind of perseverance against all odds that means no heavy metal band ever truly dies – as the joke goes, they just smell that way. However inactive they may appear, they have never actually quit.

Occasionally, you can glimpse the furious underwater paddling required to sustain the surface cool, most intriguingly in the documentary Some Kind of Monster, which Metallica hoped would chart the progress of their recording the follow-up to Reload, but which instead revealed a degree of creative bankruptcy so pronounced they were forced to hire a "performance-enhancing coach".

The resulting album, 2003's St Anger, was generally regarded as one of the poorest of their career. Five years later, their Death Magnetic was not awaited with quite the same eagerness.



ABSENCE MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER

Sometimes, it's just a matter of playing the waiting game, and playing it long enough. When Aussie rockers AC/DC, the biggest-selling heavy metal band in the world, with album sales in excess of 200 million, signed a huge multi-album deal with Sony in 2002, some observers believed both parties were being disingenuous about their real motives, with the band grabbing one last big pay-day and the label grabbing the rights to remastered reissues of rock's most successful back catalogue. After all, AC/DC hadn't released anything since the patchily received Stiff Upper Lip in 2000. The game appeared to be more or less up.

As the years passed, people simply assumed AC/DC had settled into retirement. Band members would talk of working on a 16th album, but most readers took this with a pinch of salt. The lengthening delay was blamed on business matters, then on bassist Cliff Williams' injured hand. Another AC/DC album wasn't so much long-awaited as unexpected. But then, a leisurely eight years on, out of the blue came their Black Ice album, which unlike its immediate predecessor became a global hit.

Exactly why remains a mystery: Black Ice isn't a significantly better or more appealing effort than Stiff Upper Lip, and it wasn't as if the band had been on the road, stirring up interest.

As with Guns N'Roses, AC/DC's sole promotional gambit in recent years was the inclusion of one of their songs in the Rock Band 2 videogame – and unlike GN'R, who whetted appetites with a new track from Chinese Democracy, they were represented by the hoary old crowd-pleaser Let There Be Rock. Sometimes, it seems, simply being absent for long enough is itself enough to spark a revival of interest.

THE STORY OF ROSE

Few bands, though, have been absent for as long as Guns N'Roses. After a while, it seemed their productive period had simply been a blip in their longer-term career of inactivity. One by one, Rose alienated the other members until they quit the band.

First to go was guitarist Slash, the main rival to Rose's dominance, who later admitted feeling "suicidal" when the singer rejected his songs then, without consultation, brought in a replacement guitarist. Slash was followed by the other members, while Rose exerted increasingly dictatorial control over a string of replacements, who had to submit to character analyses by the singer's guru.

The most intriguing new member was the avant-garde heavy rock guitarist Buckethead, so named for his habit of wearing a KFC bucket on his head; one can only imagine the personal quirks of those prospective band members who failed the guru's supposed "psychic inspections".

Rejecting his record label's suggestions that he work with a reputable producer, Rose assumed complete control over the recording process, employing the crew and musicians on costly retainers, but himself appearing less and less frequently at the studio, as he slipped into a prolonged reclusion that made it increasingly unlikely anything would come from the sessions. That something eventually did can surely be attributable, at least in part, to Rose's new alliance with über-manager Irving Azoff, formidable helmsman of the careers of such as The Eagles, Steely Dan, Christina Aguilera, Seal, Neil Diamond and, more recently, Morrissey.

Whatever Rose's personal foibles, it's unlikely that a mover and shaker of Azoff's power would be willing to sit by and let such a potentially profitable project wither on the vine. Just seven months after Rose became Azoff's client, the album's release was finally announced.

So it's now only a matter of hours until Chinese Democracy appears. A landmark of sorts, I suppose, but by no means the most eagerly anticipated of comeback heavy rock albums. There's one that's been "long awaited" now for over a quarter of a century – and with Robert Plant refusing to get involved, it looks like we'll just have to wait a few years longer. (The Independent)



Chinese Democracy - No UAE release date has been finalised, but the CD is scheduled to be released worldwide from next week from Dh65.