Scott Weiland is the biggest cause for concern, following years of heroin addiction, arrests for possession and enforced spells in rehab. Weiland was allowed out of his lock-down facility in Pasadena under police escort for four hours a day to record the Contraband album, and was drug-tested every evening on his return. Although clean for a couple of months now, he still has to report regularly to a counsellor in Los Angeles.
The band fell together after Slash, Duff and Matt all turned out to play at a benefit concert in 2002 for ex-Motley Crue drummer Randy Castillo, who died from cancer. They enjoyed playing without crazy control-freak Guns N' Roses vocalist Axl Rose so much that they started making plans, and when they were hired to write Set Me Free for the soundtrack of The Hulk, they went looking for a singer. They had heard Weiland had split with Stone Temple Pilots.
"We knew he was loaded," says Slash, "but he showed up and he sang great, but he did have this gigantic fucking enormous monkey thing happening, and so we talked about it. He admitted he had a problem and wanted to work on it, and we said, `Look, we've all been there, probably worse than you have, so if you want some help we'll help you,' and we just worked through it together. We were doing it one step at a time and we didn't have any visions of the future."
Weiland may be their biggest liability, but he also adds a vital whiff of volatility. His lyrics bring a sense of wrung-out personal turmoil to the VR songs, not least in the self-loathing onslaught of Big Machine ("He's a junkie piece of shit because he says so") or the album's grandiose mega-ballad, Fall to Pieces, where Weiland plays the spectator crushed by the falling debris of his own life.
"The record is really a snapshot of that year, from June 2002 when we met Scott up to October last year when we went in the studio," says Slash. "With Scott and his lyrics it's a very personal thing. I don't think any of us would want to go there unless he asked us."
The Contraband album is a smartly conceived mix of punk attitude, road-drill riffs and shrieking metal, but with plenty of hooks and harmonies to sweeten the dose. Onstage, the quintet teeter along the tightrope between passion and pastiche, with Slash spinning backwards across the stage in mid-solo with a cigarette clamped between his teeth, and Weiland wiggling and mincing as if raising a defiant digit to the entire history of heavy-metal machismo.
Sometimes they strike a pose on a plinth, center stage, Slash holding his guitar up vertically, Weiland frozen with arms aloft, and McKagan shaking his blond mane and displaying his chiselled physique. Their final song is the Guns N' Roses heroin anthem, Mr Brownstone. Not, we trust, the shape of things to come.
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