Guns N’ Roses frontman Axl Rose has said he will no longer throw his microphone into the crowd at the end of the band’s concerts after a woman claimed she was injured as a result of a stunt at their recent concert in Adelaide.
The band performed in the capital of South Australia on Tuesday (November 29). Some time after the show, a woman named Rebecca Howe told the Adelaide Advertiser that she was hit by a microphone; the photo accompanying the report shows swelling and thick bruises on both eyes, as well as cuts on the bridge of her nose.
“He bowed and then pointed the microphone at the crowd… and then hit me right on the bridge of my nose,” Hou said, noting that she was in a part of the crowd that “wasn’t even right in the front.” She went on to say that she had started hyperventilating, stressing that her face had “caved in.”
She continued, “What if it was a couple inches to the right or to the left? I could have lost an eye… What if it got into my mouth and I broke my teeth? If my head had been turned and hit me in the temple, it could have killed me.”
In response, Rose issued a statement on social media, stressing that he did not want to provoke any incident with the stunt, which he regularly did at the end of the Guns N’ Roses show for many years. “Obviously, we don’t want anyone to get hurt or hurt anyone in any way on any of [our] the show is anywhere,” he wrote.
“Dropping the microphone at the end of [our] the show is more than 30 years old, we always felt that this is the famous part of the very end of [our] performance that the fans wanted and knew about in order to be able to catch the microphone. Regardless of the interests of public safety, from now on we will refrain from throwing a microphone or anything to fans during or during [our] performances.”
Rose then criticized some media outlets for the way Howe’s alleged injury was reported, saying, “Unfortunately, [there are] those who, for their own reasons, have decided to frame their reporting on this issue in a more negative [and] irresponsible light. a light from nowhere that couldn’t be further from reality. We hope that the audience and, of course, [our] fans understand that sometimes this happens [in the original].”
— Axl Rose (@axlrose) December 2, 2022
Guns N’ Roses’ Australian tour will end tonight (December 3) in Melbourne. During the first few performances, during which they paid tribute to AC/DC, Rose reportedly ran into problems due to fans bringing and launching drones during the performance; earlier this week, he issued a statement asking concert-goers to “[play with their] toys in another place.”
On Thursday (December 1), it was announced that Guns N’ Roses will headline British Summer Time (BST) in Hyde Park for the first time in 2023. They will perform on Friday, June 30, in honor of the 10th anniversary of the London concert series.
Last month, the band released a “super deluxe” box set of their two albums “Use Your Illusion”, which included 63 tracks that had not been previously played. One of them — the “2022 version” of the song “November Rain” featuring an orchestra of 50 people — was released as a single.
Meanwhile, Slash continues to tease the follow-up to last year’s “Hard Skool” EP, stating in January that Guns N’ Roses planned to release a “full volume” of new material, and in February that new music would appear before the band went on tour in June (there was none), and then in October their next release will be “epic”.
