Rose by name, ginger by nature: Axl onstage at the Rock Am Ring Festival in Germany, 2006. Photograph: Action Press / Rex Features
At any point in the last decade, I would have said that the likelihood of Guns'N'Roses ever releasing their long-awaited album Chinese Democracy was about as much as there being a new Indiana Jones movie in the same year.
But if reports are to be believed, the album is done and it's coming out. After 15 years, $13m and more line-up reshuffles than the Sugababes, it's being reported that the band (meaning W Axl Rose, basically), have finally delivered the fifth G'N'R album to Geffen Records.
Maybe it was Dr Pepper that swung it. Last month, America's favourite bizzaro sugarwater pledged to give a free can to every American - apart from sometime guitarists Slash and Buckethead - if the album was released this year. Well, what was the worst that could happen?
Axl was delighted, posting on his blog that he was "surprised and very happy" about the pledge, and that he would share his Dr Pepper with Buckethead, leaving Slash the only US citizen without a free drink.
Chinese Democracy has been in gestation so long that it's anyone's guess what will actually end up on the finished album. But there have been hints.
Back in 1999, Guns'N'Roses contributed track called Oh my God to the End Of Days soundtrack, which seemed to hint that the album will take an industrial, Nine Inch Nails-ish direction. However, leaked songs like IRS and Sorry suggest that it will sound more like classic rock.
Rose told Rolling Stone in 2006: "It's a very complex record. I'm trying to do something different. Some of the arrangements are kind of like Queen. Some people are going to say, 'it doesn't sound like Axl Rose, it doesn't sound like Guns'N'Roses'. But you''ll like at least a few songs on there." Which sounds ominous to say the least.
Sebastian Bach of Skid Row, reckons that Chinese Democracy is actually the first in a trilogy of albums from the Gunners, which at this rate of progress might be completed in 2038. Meanwhile, whispers are that everyone from Brian May to Dave Navarro to basketball player Shaquille O'Neal could have played a part in the recording.
But we still know tantalisingly little. If any other band on Earth had taken this long (apart from, maybe, Portishead), the world would have told them to bore off. It's just that G'N'R occupy such a grand, ostentatious place in our rock consciousness, and they were, for a while, brilliant. It might not be appropriate to say this in the Guardian, but Appetite for Destruction remains one of the greatest albums ever made.
There has been portent for a while. Only last week, the former members of G'N'R split with Scott Weiland - their Axl stand-in for the Velvet Revolver project. Within a week, he'd reformed Stone Temple Pilots and Slash et al were muttering darkly about whoever they might get to replace him. Never mind the Police or the Spice Girls - could the rock reunion to end them all really be on the cards?
And by the way, I don't write about G'N'R on the internet lightly anymore. The last time, I was met with messageboard threats of having "my ass splattered across a subway," if I ever dared set foot in the United States after mentioning Axl's girth and his weave in my NME.com review of the band's Leeds Festival appearance in 2002. (I've been to America since, and my ass is intact.)
Axl himself was a little more eloquent than those fans. The next day he screamed from the stage of Wembley arena: "Some pussy-assed writer from NME reckons I'm as big as a house. Well if that's true then that pussy owes me rent, for living in my ass for so long."
I will never get bored of telling that tale
