“Hello London! We are not Stone Temple Pilots! We are not Guns’n’Roses! We are Velvet f*cking Revolver!” It’s exactly 0.04 into the foreboding, spiteful little intro to "Sucker Train Blues" and Scott Weiland, Velvet Revolver’s snarling, insectoid, impossibly camp frontman, is already bothered by something.
In fact, through the course of this magnetic, self-lacerating, car-wrecking triumph of a show, it becomes clear he’s bothered by a lot of things: his past. His bandmates’ pasts. The rock media. Demons. And thank Christ. On this, the first ever London show by the pick-up band he founded with G’n’R refugees Slash, Duff McKagan and Matt Sorum, as well as former Danzig's Dave Kushner, it’s his almost psychotic pissed-offness, combined with the kind of showmanly flair that suggests his 36 years has largely been spent throwing shapes in front of the bedroom mirror - he looks brilliant - that defines Velvet Revolver’s appeal. And, crucially, it’s what stops them being just another supergroup jam.
As this year’s fine debut album suggests, the former Stone Temple Pilots frontman and his bandmates, initially written off as a kind of 12-step programme for five of rock’s most notorious high-life casualties, have something to prove. And prove it they do, for the most part. "Sucker Train Blues" is brilliant, humming like a circling V1 before exploding into the kind of chorus that manages to sound gentle, consoling and endlessly vindictive. "Slither"'s glitter-boot stomp suggests Weiland – rocking the Nazi rent boy look, sidewinding across the stage and declaiming his vocals through a loud hailer in a way that’s been described as “like an alien dictator declaiming a victory speech” – is not just the focal point for the show, but the driving force behind the band.
He’s not. While the singer works the room with every trick he knows, one-time G’n’R guitarist cum global brand Slash makes like a particularly hairy standard lamp. It doesn’t matter: every note, every tilt of the trademark fuzz of hair, is cheered and whooped. When he pours out the fluting solo riff to new single "Fall To Pieces", the cheering grows into a huge roar of support. The crowd’s goodwill towards Velvet Revolver – these are showbiz-strapped times, and this is nothing if not showbiz – is such that, even when the succession of squelchy, mid-paced rockers ("Do It For the Kids", "Headspace" and "Spectacle") begin to drag, the mass of chanting, hands-aloft kids keeps the energy level high.
Eventually, the band bows to the inevitable. An hour into their set, they’ve played all of the songs from their only album. And when they do finally plunge, without a word of introduction, into a selection of their combined greatest hits, it’s less of a cop-out or capitulation – more of a reminder, in case one were needed. Because, what hits. A countrified version of "Used to Love Her" with Weiland reclining like Dietrich on the amps, snarling out the words Axl used to whine; a punked-up "It’s So Easy", spat through a megaphone; Stone Temple Pilots’ "Sex Type Thing" whispered like a stalker’s threat.
They are not Guns’n’Roses. They are not Stone Temple Pilots. They are Velvet Revolver. And with a few more shows like this, and another album as consistent as "Contraband" under their belts, they might (just might) stop beating up on themselves for that quite so much. But then, if they did, we’d all be worse off.
