Duff McKagan: "I have my Irish passport and citizenship"

Late September finds Gun N’ Roses bassist Duff McKagan returning to Dublin to kick off the tour for his fourth solo album, Lighthouse, a beautiful collection of acoustic numbers that wonderfully showcases McKagan’s lyrical and melodic flair. When I catch up with the affable musician over Zoom, he explains he’s at home in Seattle, and turns the camera to show the gorgeous lakeside view outside the window.

“We did a remodel on our house, which we’ve had for 30 years,” Duff explains. “We bought it back to its 1920s-style glamour. This is my daughter’s room; she’s 23 and lives in New York City. We made these rooms for our daughters and now they don’t live here! The view from this room is amazing, and it’s where I come and do my interviews and stuff, it’s great.”

I first interviewed Duff way back in 2008, when he was releasing a record by his side project Loaded. Indeed, away from GNR, the bassist has released music in many different guises, and maintained a prolific level of output over the years.

“I don’t don’t even know how to explain that,” he considers. “Doing stuff outside Gun N’ Roses, I see how that looks. For me, I’m just writing songs. With Loaded, that was kind of my rock version of what I’m doing now with Lighthouse and so on. When I started writing songs for for my previous LP, Tenderness, I found a new path simply by listening to my acoustic guitar against my chest. It wasn’t like I started writing songs for a record – I was just doing it to write.”

As McKagan explains, the productivity continued even after the album was released.

“I kept writing songs and also toured Tenderness, and then the pandemic hit,” he notes. “I’d just got my studio and recorded about six songs. Guns were supposed to go out and do a big tour, which we pushed back a year-and-a-half. Suddenly, I’m back in Seattle with my family. I was like, ‘I’ll take two weeks to go in and finish those six songs.’ Then the two weeks turned into four and I went, ‘Well, I’ve got another six songs.’ Before I knew it, during that whole time, I had about 60 songs recorded.

“I do hold songs and say, ‘This one would be good for Guns, or this one would be good for somebody else.’ With me having a studio now, I can write a song the night before, and then go in and record it the next day. I have Martin, my producer, who’s doing it full time now. We’re cranking it out.”

Noted for being an enthusiastic reader and writer – he’s penned two books as well hundreds of articles for different publications – who are some of Duff’s favourite authors?

“Cormac McCarthy,” he replies, before showing me a tattoo on his arm. “When he passed away last year, I got the first line from Blood Meridian tattooed. It’s one of my favourite books ever. Especially in a book like The Road, McCarthy can make three words make you wanna cry. Once you realise he might have to shoot the boy with the gun, you go, ‘Oh, my god.’ But he said it in three to five words, and I remember that just crushing me. I was going, ‘How does he do that with a story?’”

Notably on Lighthouse, song titles include ‘Holy Water’ and ‘I Saw God On 10th St.’ Don’t tell me Guns N’ Roses are becoming devout in their old age!

“Well,” laughs Duff. “You’d have to read lyrics for those ones!”

In fact, I did read the lyrics, and ‘10th St.’ features references to Ukraine and Russia, as well as a line about “God swearing at the White House”. Clearly, the tumultuous state of the world has made its presence felt on the record. Another song, ‘Just Another Shakedown’, offers a cynical look at the cavalcade of used car salesman who’ve unfortunately come to dominate politics.

“Two of my brothers were in Vietnam,” notes Duff, “and I’ve talked to them about it, like, ‘Is this the craziest shit you’ve ever seen?’ They’re like, ‘Oh yeah, there’s been nothing like this.’ So, I don’t know. Social media sure has a lot to do with it, with people just focusing on the bad shit. Cable news here in America is really god awful. If you come to America, don’t watch it!”

As well as an appearance from Duff’s GNR bandmate Slash, another legend guessing on Lighthouse is Iggy Pop. Last  Christmas, I caught a Sky Arts showing of the concert film Pop recorded at the Royal Albert Hall for his album Post Pop Depression. It was a stunning reminder of the singer’s genuinely iconic status, made all the powerful by the fact that his all-star backing band was lead by Queens Of The Stone Age head honcho Josh Homme, who also produced Post Pop Depression.

In helming that record, Homme – as well making explicit the punk lineage from Pop to QOTSA – caught the true spirit of Iggy.

“Yeah,” nods Duff. “Agreed.”

For me, the most powerful moment at any Irish gig last year came when QOTSA performed ‘Song For The Dead’ at their 3Arena show in November. With their late great friend and collaborator Mark Lanegan having passed away in Kerry, where he spent the final years of his life, it was a moment of powerful emotional resonance. As a long-term friend of his fellow Seattle artist, did McKagan stay in contact with Lanegan when he relocated to the Kingdom?

“Of course,” he responds. “He was like, ‘You should move here.’ I have my Irish passport and citizenship, cos my grandfather came from Cork. If you’re American, you can get an Irish passport – you have to jump through a bunch of hoops to get it, you have to prove everything. So I proved everything and got my Irish passport in 2018. It’s really nice; I use it when I come into Ireland and they’re like, ‘Welcome home.’ And of course I have family there and so on.”

As we chat about Guns N’ Roses, I mention I saw the band perform in Hong Kong at the end of 2018, on their Not In This Lifetime reunion tour. It was a blockbuster excursion that – thanks to grosses in excess of a cool half-a-billion dollars – currently occupies a place amongst the top ten highest earning tours of all time.

Duff McKagan by Niall Fennessey

“That was my first time in Hong Kong,” reflects Duff. “It’s cool, it’s very exotic.”

Coming into the city and seeing the skyscrapers and neon around Victoria Bay, Hong Kong’s futurist feel reminded me heavily of Blade Runner. Indeed, in directing the movie, Ridley Scott drew extensively on his youthful experiences making TV commercials in the city.

“Conversely, I went out to a place called Repulse Bay, where my wife did a photo shoot for something,” says Duff. “It was old school – a fancy British hotel on the bay, from the 1890s. It was really cool going to this place and going back in time. It was well outside Hong Kong on the ocean, just brilliant. And the gigs were great.”

One moment that’s always stayed with me from that show was GNR’s cover of Soundgarden’s ‘Black Hole Sun’, which they debuted a year-and-a-half earlier at Slane, following the tragic death of Chris Cornell. As the band played, I found myself thinking of the interview I did with Cornell in Dublin in 2007. Early in our conversation, a fire alarm went off, so surreally, we completed the interview sitting on a wall in the courtyard outside – it was literally just me and Cornell chatting as the world went by. Though I’d never been a huge Soundgarden guy, listening to GNR perform ‘Black Hole Sun’, the genius of the song finally revealed itself to me.

In particular I was struck by the lyric “Times are gone for honest men” – an especially resonant sentiment given the political tenor of the times, and a line worth of Cormac McCarthy himself.

“Yeah, the lyrics in that song are so good,” nods Duff. “Chris had a lot of great lyrics, but ‘Times are gone for honest men’ – that’s such a Cormac line, isn’t it?”

Sadly, tragedy has also visited the GNR camp in recent times, with Slash’s young step-daughter, Lucy-Bleu Knight, passing away earlier in the summer. It was a harrowing moment that saw a wide outpouring of sympathy for the iconic guitarist. On far less important matters, as McKagan and I talk, I find myself bringing up the power of Gun N’ Roses’ imagery, with everything from the band’s look to their album covers adding to their outlaw appeal.

“Well, I remember when Axl found the original artwork for Appetite For Destruction, it was like on a postcard,” says Duff. “We looked at it and went, ‘Wow’. With the imagery for Appetite, we were thinking, ‘What represents the band?’ We had the idea of the space shuttle blowing up – that’s the sign of our times, you know? We knew who we were solidly at that point.

“The imagery of that poster, of that artwork by Robert Williams, really set a tone for us. Of course, it got banned and all that kind of shit. But it was like, ‘That’s a strong image. You can make so much out of it – the rape of humankind by machinery.’ So that got us going. Then there was the Mark Kostabi stuff for the Use Your Illusion albums – really cool imagery.

“Our lithographs for concerts – we just have artists, locally from all over the world, pitching stuff to us. There’s a really funny one, from St. Paul, Minnesota when we played there. It’s me, Axl and Slash as the Charlie Brown characters from the Peanuts cartoon. Because the artist who created Peanuts, Charles M. Schulz, is from St. Paul. It was really funny and ingenious. We’ll use that artwork for the t-shirts for that gig. But we try and stay away from fire and skulls, and get a little deeper into art.”

Indeed, the band’s image for an LA gig last year – a riff on the famous poster for Chinatown – might be the best concert flyer I’ve ever seen. Going further back, the first time GNR ever made a serious impact on me was when, as an 11-year-old, I caught a Channel 4 broadcast of their 1992 Rock In Rio gig. I was especially mesmerised by their performance of the sleazy blues-rocker ‘Mr Brownstone’ – to this day my favourite GNR tune – but watching the clip back on YouTube, the visual impact of the band is quite overwhelming.

As Slash throws guitar hero shapes, Duff and the other members flaunt a perfect rock and roll rebel look. But as one of music’s greatest ever frontmen, it’s Axl Rose who steals the show. Wearing a ridiculously cool Charles Bukowski t-shirt, the singer is a study in fuck you, anti-establishment attitude, the piece de resistance coming during Slash’s solo, when – to the raucous cheers of the crowd – he slings the mic stand behind his back and carries it across the stage like a crucifix.

It’s an unforgettable piece of rock theatre, and honestly, the kind of instinctive genius that separate the true superstars from the merely very good. Still, Duff is at pains to point out that the band always paid scant attention to sartorial choices.

“It’s not thought out!” he chuckles. “I don’t think there’s been one discussion of, ‘What are you wearing?’ Ever! Everybody’s got their own kind of style, the thing they’re comfortable in. But with the t-shirts from different eras – I’ve seen old stuff where I’m like, ‘Where’d that fuckin’ t-shirt go?!’ It just disappears!”

• Duff McKagan plays The Academy, Dublin on September 30.

Listen to Lighthouse below: