The 1989 band Jeff Lynne wishes he could delete from history: “They are just rubbish”
When Guns N’ Roses broke up, Axl Rose carried on performing as the band with brand new members, and it led to some of the most excruciating performances in their history.
One of the worst came about when Axl Rose and his new group of vagabonds took to the stage at the 2002 MTV Awards. It wasn’t the Guns N’ Roses that people were used to, as Rose was singing alongside a strange mix of people who fans didn’t recognise, including Buckethead, who wore a mask and a KFC bucket on, you guessed it, his head. Slash was so embarrassed by the performance that he point-blank refused to watch it.
“I didn’t see it…I refuse to see it. It was one of those things where I got a bunch of phone calls one morning and [people] leaving me messages going, you know, ‘What was that whole thing about on TV’ and I didn’t know what it was,” he said, “When it finally ended, it was like a no turning back kind of thing. And so when I heard what it was, it was the MTV Awards, and I heard the reaction from the people that saw it, I didn’t wanna see something, I didn’t wanna leave, you know, that memory of whatever Guns N’ Roses was. When I left, it was still sort of cool.”
This is a common problem that bands everywhere face, as once they’ve split up, some members want to continue profiting off the name that many listeners have come to know and love. It’s made a lot of splits less than amicable, as bands don’t just stop performing together, but are left bickering over who has the right to use the name and who doesn’t.
Pink Floyd had it when Roger Waters left, as David Gilmour and co continued using the name, despite the fact that Waters believed the band stopped with him. He didn’t hide how subpar he thought that the albums the band released from that point on were, going as far as to say that he felt sorry for fans who had bought them.
“With all due respect to the people who went out and bought those records, they are just rubbish,” he said when talking about the albums Pink Floyd went on to release once he left, “Particularly The Division Bell; it’s just nonsense from beginning to end.”
Jeff Lynne had exactly the same issue once his band, Electric Light Orchestra (ELO), broke up in the ‘80s. Lynne had already made a pretty big name for himself, and so was happy to embrace life as a solo artist, but a lot of the other members of the band weren’t keen on leaving behind such a great moneymaker and conversation driver. One of these members was Bev Bevan, the former drummer of the band, who decided to go and start his own group called ELO Part II.
Naturally, Lynne was pretty frustrated with this move, and would rather the band didn’t exist. After all, he was the one who wrote the majority of the songs. He thought about suing Bevan, but in the end decided to leave well enough alone and grit his teeth at the thought of such a band existing.
“He wants to dig it all up again,” said Lynne, “To me, it’s silly. At one point, I thought about suing him. I mean, I did write all the songs for ELO, except for one by Chuck Berry, and I produced them all. But in the end, I thought, ‘Well, why go to all the expense of two years in court?’ I decided it isn’t worth the bother. It’s nothing to do with me at all.”
