The irony is, allegedly the reason they were late on was Axl was apparently having anxiety issues over his voice going. But he sounds ten times better in the lower register! I'll take low growly Axl over the "right" notes in a Mickey voice any day. Either stick with this, or take the songs and transpose them to a lower key so he can sing the "old" vocal lines.

Well, by some miracle I managed to get a refund from Ticketmaster.

Show was pretty good; Axl and the band were on form, but they started late so they just blasted through the hits with no deep cuts. They even cut YCBM! One day I'll get to hear them play fucking Madagascar or TWAT...

Fortus was buried in the mix for the first few songs, Axl stopped Estranged halfway through to ask the audience is they could actually hear him. And Carrie Underwood turned up for SCOM and PC.

The thing is Robin is an interesting lead player; I'd love to see him in a Zeppelin/Queen-esque set-up where there's only one guitarist who gets to define the entire sound of the band. But in a GN'R setting where there's a weight of expectation as to how the band should sound, I'm not sure it entirely clicks. And I say that as a Robin fan who loves his contributions.

So you either go with the original plan – Robin as the only lead player, a complete change of direction for the sound, and wave goodbye to all those epic Buckethead solos that are outside of his comfort zone. Or you accept that Finck would be wasted on rhythm and go with a Fortus/Buckethead combo.

But then you run into the problem of Buckethead not really clicking with the other band members (Tommy in particular). Basically, a two-guitar setup with Fortus and Buckethead was probably the winning combo, but I'm not sure it would've lasted in any case, just because of the personalities involved.

Ironically the setup that would've probably been most acceptable to GN'R fans from the off would've been Fortus on lead and someone else on rhythm. Fortus has a look and feel that isn't alienating to GN'R fans, he can shred, etc etc. But by the time he auditioned, Axl had found Buckethead and had the bit between his teeth...

The fatal mistake in 2006 was not moving heaven and Earth to get Buckethead back. Ron was good, but he's not iconic in the same way Buckethead and Slash are, and it reinforced the idea that GN'R was a revolving-door operation where Axl needed three guitarists to replace Slash. It introduced delays as Axl felt obliged to add Ron to the album, but he still wanted to respect Bucket's contributions/couldn't bring himself to lose Bucket's guitar parts, so you end up with this Chinese stew of bits and pieces.

And it fucked the promo; you can no longer bill the band as a stable, coherent line-up, the "new GN'R," instead it's a chaotic attempt to replace Slash that's constantly in flux because "Axl can't find anyone good enough." The Better video now needs re-editing to include Bumblefoot, but it's got Buckethead on it as though he was still a current member. Casual viewers will be wondering how many fucking guitarists this band has in it. And then Robin bails and you face the prospect of re-editing the thing again to include DJ Ashba and it looks like there are five guitarists in the band, for crying out loud.

If Buckethead had been there in 2006, the post-Slash era of GN'R would've looked very different.