Guns N’ Roses, with founding members Axl Rose and Slash, will headline the Coachella Music & Arts Festival in Indio, California on April 15th-17th and April 22nd-24th, according to multiple sources. The reunited band is also negotiating with promoters to play as many as 25 football stadiums in North America in the summer of 2016, and is scheduled to be one of the first acts to play the new Las Vegas Arena, set to open April 6th. Guns N’ Roses is said to be asking as much as $3 million per show, with tickets topping out in the $250-$275 range.
The last show Axl Rose and Slash played together was on July 17th, 1993 at River Plate Stadium in Buenos Aires. Guns N’ Roses’ most recent tour, which only included Axl Rose from the original lineup, took place primarily in South America and The Joint in Las Vegas, grossing $15.2 million.
Representatives for the band, as well as Coachella producer Paul Tollett and agent Ken Fermaglich at United Talent Agency, could not be reached for comment. Executives at AEG, which will operate the new Vegas arena, also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The band’s first album, Appetite for Destruction, is the biggest-selling debut in U.S. history, with 18 million sold. It spent five weeks at number one on the Billboard 200 chart, and launched the number one Billboard Hot 100 single Sweet Child O’ Mine.” They have sold 44.5 million albums total in the U.S., according to the Recording Industry Association of America.
Billboard’s confirmation comes on the heels of two rumor-inducing hints dropped over the past week, the first a cryptic update to the Guns N’ Roses website and the second during screenings of Star Wars: The Force Awakens, where footage of a concert crowd was shown with Guns music overdubbed. Though longtime fans may be understandably wary after the decade-plus wait for Chinese Democracy, which became a totem of sorts to frontman Axl Rose’s sometimes unpredictable behavior, this reunion bears no sign of that record’s bumpy road.
Coachella has a pedigree for coaxing much-loved acts out of retirement, or being the linchpin to plans that had already been simmering. The fest has previously hosted the reunions of Rage Against The Machine in 2007, My Bloody Valentine in 2009, Pulp in 2012 and Outkast in 2014 — not to mention Tupac’s posthumous return to the stage in 2012. Guns N’ Roses will arrive a year after two other legendary acts, AC/DC and Steely Dan, headlined the 2015 edition. Last year’s edition drew 198,000 to the California desert, generating $84.2 million in revenue, according to Boxscore.
hhhh According to Motorhead’s manager Todd Singerman, singer Lemmy Kilmister was given “two to six months to live” when he was told he had terminal cancer on December 26th.
Singerman told Sky News that Kilmister went to hospital two days after his 70th- birthday party at the Whisky A Go Go club in Hollywood, California on December 13th because he wasn’t feeling well. Although, his doctors initially thought he was fine, they decided to do a brain scan before releasing him because “his speech was seeming a little odd. We wanted to see if maybe [he’d had] a minor stroke.” The scan uncovered tumors in Lemmy’s brain and neck.
Singerman told Sky News on Monday, “Nobody had any idea, we just learned Saturday, two days ago, that he even had cancer, and the doctor told him he had between two to six months to live. He [died] today as I was making calls to [ bandmates] Phil [Campbell] and Mikkey [Dee], telling them to come on out so they could have a last goodbye while he was still upbeat and everything. He was feeling mighty low… He wasn’t expected to die like that.”
Singerman added, “He [Lemmy] gets home [from tour], we have a big birthday party for him at the Whisky A Go Go. His friends came down and played. Two days later, I could tell he wasn’t feeling good, so we took him to the hospital, they release him, then after the brain scan they found the cancer in his brain and his neck… The doctor comes with the result a couple of days later and says… it’s terminal.”
Singerman initially wanted to keep the diagnosis private, but Lemmy insisted otherwise. “He was like, ‘No, no. You go ahead and put out a press release,” the manager told RollingStone.com. “I want people to know it was cancer. It’s a bad thing and they should know it.’ That’s how he felt.”
Despite Lemmy’s well-documented health issues over the last two years, Singerman said the cancer diagnosis “caught everyone by surprise. [Cancer] was the last thing we thought he would ever have. When you think about it, he has been to every doctor and hospital around the world and nobody caught that… That comes as a massive shock.”
Back in 1979 when I was 16 years old, I heard Overkill for the first time. I thought it was the fastest thing I’d ever heard, and I declared to all my friends that Motörhead were the fastest band in the land.
When I had first seen pictures of what these guys looked like, I noticed a certain authenticity about them. I imagined they lived the way they looked and looked the way they lived.
And I remember very distinctly having a realization that moment — I realized that it was OK to be an outsider and that it was OK to not feel like I had to conform to anything that I objected to in my teenage life because clearly the Motörhead guys in this picture looked like they didn’t conform to anything at all and boy it sure looked and sounded like they were enjoying themselves as a result.
So I got a lot from that pic and that massive sound and that attitude.
And I have to thank Lemmy, Fast Eddie and also the recently departed Philthy Animal for the inspiration, spark and fire that I felt so strongly from that night in 1979.
That inspiration will always be there with me and may the music of Motörhead live on!”
”Motörhead is over, of course. Lemmy was Motörhead. But the band will live on in the memories of many,” the drummer reveals in a telephone interview. He added, “We won’t be doing any more tours or anything. And there won’t be any more records. But the brand survives, and Lemmy lives on in the hearts of everyone.”
The last city to host Motörhead was Berlin, earlier this year. Despite already suffering from his illness Kilmister battled his way through to the end of the group’s Europe tour.
”He was terribly gaunt, he spent all his energy on stage and afterwards he was very, very tired,” Mikkey Dee says. ”It’s incredible that he could even play, that he could finish the Europe tour. It was only 20 days ago. Unbelievable.”
…Dee concedes that Motörhead wrapped up its career in the best possible way.
”It feels fantastic that we were able to complete the tour with him. It’s heartening that we didn’t cancel because of Lemmy,” he says. “I’m incredibly grateful over the years we had, and that we had such a good time together,” he adds.
Ian Kilmister — also known as Lemmy, of the British heavy metal pioneers Motörhead — died Monday at age 70 of “extremely aggressive cancer,” the band said.
Kilmister — who legendarily survived diabetes and implantation of a heart defibrillator — was diagnosed with the disease just two days ago, the band said in a statement.
“There is no easy way to say this,” Motörhead said. “Our mighty, noble friend Lemmy passed away today after a short battle with an extremely aggressive cancer.
“He had learnt of the disease on December 26th, and was at home, sitting in front of his favorite video game from The Rainbow which had recently made it’s way down the street, with his family,” the band said. “We cannot begin to express our shock and sadness, there aren’t words.”
Motörhead had canceled several recent performances because of what the band said was a lung infection.
The band had to stop short its September 1st concert in Austin, Texas, with Kilmister telling the audience, “I can’t do it,” and walking offstage. The band blamed altitude sickness — Kilmister had recently spent time in Colorado — and said it was looking forward to going back out on the road in February.
Kilmister, a raw-voiced singer and powerful heavy metal bassist, formed Motörhead in 1975 and was its sole remaining original member. The band’s 22 albums included the landmarks “Ace of Spades” — and the hit single of the same name — Overkill and No Sleep ‘Til Hammersmith.
Its most recent album, Bad Magic debuted at Number One in much of Europe and hit the Top 40 in the United States. The titles of several other of its hits and albums can’t be reproduced on a family-friendly website.
Prominent rock musicians have lobbied in recent years for Motörhead to be inducted into the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Acts like Black Sabbath and Green Day have said it helped to form their musical philosophies, citing it as a foundational influence in heavy metal and punk rock.
Lost one of my best friends, Lemmy, today. He will be sadly missed. He was a warrior and a legend. I will see you on the other side.
— Ozzy Osbourne (@OzzyOsbourne) December 29, 2015
#RIPLemmy A true rocker from beginning to end. We’ll all see you there, soon enough. pic.twitter.com/80wflIsTEf
— Joe Perry (@JoePerry) December 29, 2015
Lemmy RIP….@myMotorhead my condolences to his family..
— Billy Idol (@BillyIdol) December 29, 2015
