Def Lep Collen slams 'lame' Guns N' Roses reunion

Def Leppard guitarist Phil Collen has described the Guns N’ Roses reunion as “fucking lame.”

Slash, Axl Rose and Duff McKagan announced last month that they’d reunited for a string of dates that now stretches to five shows, with more announcements expected to follow.

But Collen says that if Def Lep could stay together through the death of Steve Clark in 1991, drummer Rick Allen losing an arm in a 1984 car crash and fellow guitarist Vivian Campbell’s 2013 diagnosis with Hodgkin’s Lymphoma, GNR should never have fallen out over a “little barney backstage” in the first place.

Collen tells The Telegraph: “We obviously think it’s really fucking lame. I love Guns N’ Roses, I think they’re really cool, I’d love to see Slash and Axl and Duff play together, that’s great.

“But I think it’s fucking lame considering we’ve been hardcore. Our integrity’s still intact, we’ve never split up. We’ve gone through if someone had a little sniffle or something, we soldier on.

“Someone dies, someone loses an arm, someone gets cancer, we soldier on.”

Referring to GNR, he adds: “If someone has a little barney backstage, they can’t deal with each other. I know it’s difficult, but I do think it’s pretty lame when you compare anyone else to us.”

This week, Def Leppard cancelled the remaining dates on their US tour as frontman Joe Elliott was ordered to rest as a result of a throat problem.

Stef wrote close to 5,000 stories during his time as assistant online news editor and later as online news editor between 2014-2016. An accomplished reporter and journalist, Stef has written extensively for a number of UK newspapers and also played bass with UK rock favourites Logan. His favourite bands are Pixies and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Stef left the world of rock'n'roll news behind when he moved to his beloved Canada in 2016, but he started on his next 5000 stories in 2022.