In the late 70s, he was the singer in Girl, the London sleaze rockers whose influence on the LA bands that followed half a decade later has never been credited in full. “He’s a loner in a lot of ways, always looking to be accepted.”īut Lewis has more miles on the rock’n’roll clock than many of his contemporaries.

“The first time I met Phil, he was sat at a table in the Cat And Fiddle pub in Hollywood, hiding behind some sunglasses, shy as you can be,” Guns says of his bandmate. He’s also a lot more reserved than his image as a louche, leather-trousered eternal brat would suggest, though he’s always friendly. That’s what a good private school education buys you. His precise consonants and easy manner are a world away from the transatlantic drawl he deploys on record. He may have spent 30 years living in Los Angeles, but Phil Lewis could still pass himself off as minor member of the British aristocracy, at least vocally. The hapless frontman was promptly dispatched, leaving the door open for the man who would help take L.A. ‘We were at a signing meeting with this label, and the A&R guy goes to our singer at the time, ‘Hey buddy, whaddya want to get out of this as career?’” he recalls, “and the guy just nodded forward. The main obstacle appeared to be certain members of the band themselves. Their early years were a struggle, but given that Los Angeles was rapidly becoming the epicentre of the music industry, not that much of a struggle. Guns was too ambitious to quit now, and he reactivated L.A. And that was the end of me being in Guns N’ Roses.” “Except when it came to a head and we had a disagreement. It was a great experience and there was no downside.” He laughs. “We had places to stay, but we fancied being out on the street, hanging out and taking in Hollywood together. “Me and Axl were faux-homeless,” says Guns. The two who shared the driving seat became tight friends. Guns had merged with another local band, Hollywood Rose, and combined their names: Guns N’ Roses. “He opened his mouth and I was, like, ‘Holy shit, who is this guy?’” “I’ll never forget watching Axl walk up to the microphone for the first time in soundcheck,” he says. Tracii initially met Axl via Hollywood Rose guitarist Izzy Stradlin’, who was crashing at Guns’ mom’s house. Guns shared bills with other similarly hungry hopefuls: WASP, Poison, Hollywood Rose, the latter fronted by a red-haired wildcat calling himself Axl Rose. “That felt great, to look out into the crowd at the Troubadour and see David Lee Roth or Nikki Sixx standing there. “We were packing out shows right away,” he says. Mötley Crüe had become the first band from that scene to break big nationally, and everyone wanted a piece of their action. Guns together in 1983 – not old enough to drink legally (he was never a big drinker anyway). He was barely 17 when he put the first incarnation of L.A. “Being really competitive with each other, but loving each other at the same time.” “We’d walk to school every day, having these really combative discussions about music – what was cool, what was not,” he says. One of his best friends at junior high school was a curly-haired kid called Saul Hudson – later to rechristen himself Slash.

As a kid, he loved rock’n’roll – Aerosmith, Led Zeppelin, the Eagles, Elton John. Unlike all those arrivistes that followed, he’s Los Angeles through and through. Guns himself wasn’t just there at the birth of the glam metal scene, he predates it. “After the first six hundred people it’s all the same anyway,” he says modestly (a polite and self-effacing man, he does ‘modest’ well). Around theat time the band were playing to two or three thousand people a night. Even at their commercial peak, around the time of their second album, 1989’s Cocked And Loaded, L.A. Guns himself is the first to admit that his band were never Sunset Strip A-listers in the way that Mötley Crüe or GN’R were. Guns 2017: Shane Fitzgibbons, Phil Lewis, Tracii Guns, Johnny Martin, Michael Grant

L.a. guns just between you and me