It's great to be on a tour and be healthy. I go to the gym in the day, go out and see stuff or sit in my hotel room and play my bass and write songs.

"The world is an interesting place. It was interesting when I was f***ed up too!"

So says former Guns 'N' Roses bassist Duff McKagan about his new life on the road with the supergroup Velvet Revolver.

It is a world away from his time with the champions of rock 'n' roll excess he started his career with.

Guns N' Roses shot to fame with the international success of their debut album Appetite For Destruction, and filled stadia across the world in the early Nineties following the release of their two Use Your Illusion albums.

Drugs and drink played a part in the collapse of the band in the mid-Nineties - but they weren't so much of a problem when the band was starting out ten years earlier, when Duff first met top-hatted guitarist Slash.

"Slash and I first met when I was 19 years old," says Duff, whose real name is Michael. "I had just moved down to LA from Seattle. We were both heavy drinkers when Guns 'N' Roses first formed, but we were pretty functional drinkers.

"We could go out and write songs and book gigs and do everything we needed to do. We were hyper-active. It wasn't until our late 20s when more drugs started to take their toll that it all started to get really ugly."

A lot of what kept Duff going was his relationship with the Stoke-on-Trent-born Slash, originally christened Saul Hudson.

"We knew where the line was and we would keep an eye on each other without saying anything," says Duff. "It was that drunk support system. We have been through a lot of s*** together."

How crazy a time it was is documented in Slash's new autobiography, which Duff admits to having read.

"There were no nasty shocks," he says. "It was interesting because my memory completely draws blanks, especially around the early Nineties.

"There is stuff in his book that is hilarious and it is great for me to see how he remembers it."

He jokes that the only way he could put together a similar book is through interviewing people about their memories of him.

"People come up to me and say, Remember when we did this?' and I don't remember. It would be great to interview people about all this stuff I don't have any memory of."

He does recall some of life in the centre of the Guns N' Roses hurricane, though.

"There was a story back when Guns 'N' Roses was just breaking and the mania was starting. A story went out on the AP wire that I had been trapped in a car wreck and broken my leg, which wasn't true! My mom called and left this message at my apartment after she read it. There was some crazy stuff going on."

Guns 'N' Roses eventually broke up after their 1993 covers album The Spaghetti Incident, although frontman Axl Rose still takes different line-ups out on the road with him under the Guns 'N' Roses name and is supposedly still working on the long-awaited Chinese Democracy album.

"Guns 'N' Roses never went into decline," Duff points out. "We were playing stadiums and stuff. We just ended. There is a misconception about that."

After a short time playing in the side-project Slash's Snakepit and working on his own solo album, Duff moved back home to Seattle - a decision made partly due to health news that in his own words, "wasn't good".

Reports at the time say he was told he had to give up drinking because of the poor state of his pancreas.

"It turned my life around," he says.

"I went out and explored what was out there. I met a woman and had my first child, I went to university, I had a band in Seattle and played in spring breaks from school.

"Life was good for me, and life is just great now we have this band. It's an extra added bonus."

Velvet Revolver arose from a one-off 2002 show that reunited Duff with Slash and drummer Matt Sorum, who had joined Guns 'N' Roses in 1991.

"We got in the room together to rehearse for this benefit gig and from the first moment we hit the first chord it was, Holy f*** why didn't we play together for seven years?'," Duff says.

"Part of the reason we didn't form a band in 1994/95 is because we didn't want to be stigmatised as those guys from Guns 'N' Roses. That time really afforded a break from people's perception of what we do."

Former G 'N' R guitarist Izzy Stradlin was apparently approached to join the fledgling new band, but Velvet Revolver eventually recruited Wasted Youth's Dave Kushner instead.

The tough search for a lead singer was filmed by VH1, with the band eventually plumping for former Stone Temple Pilots frontman Scott Weiland. The completed line-up released their debut album, Contraband, in 2003.

"Scott is great," says Duff. "It was destiny that the five of us should come together - at least it felt that way when Scott walked into the room and sang his first line with us. It was like, There it is'.

"There is an unspoken thing with him and us. It is almost as if he's led a parallel life to the rest of us."

Earlier this year there were reports that Scott had voluntarily gone into rehab, causing a Velvet Revolver tour of Australia to be cancelled.

"It is a brutal thing, addiction, and I should know," says Duff. "You just hope - you can't say anything for sure. I think he'll be fine."

This tour is in support of the band's second album, Libertad, an album which initially took its name from a T-shirt Duff had.

"It didn't mean anything for us at the time," says Duff. "We hadn't written a song for it, but we had a name. In a way the songs grew into theme of the title.

"I think we felt a lot freer musically because we didn't have any pressure on us. We had a successful record with Contraband, the record company was way into us, we had a fanbase and we could just write songs."

He feels there is a resurgence of the Seventies classic rock sound, with groups like Vancouver's Black Mountain gradually gaining popularity.

"I think it's great there are bands like that out there to bring a much-needed musicality to rock 'n' roll that has been missing," says Duff.

"I've been helping out at my daughter's school, teaching a rock class there to fifth graders, but they aren't playing new rock songs. They're playing songs by Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Bad Company. We're asking them, where did they learn all this stuff?"

He is also very supportive of the MySpace phenomenon and the rise of the independent music scene.

"I think it's great, that anyone can have a MySpace page," he says. "It's a lot more exposure than when I was starting bands in the early Eighties. If there had been MySpace then it would have been much easier to tour as a punk rock band!"

  • Starts 7.30pm, tickets £32.50. Call 0844 8471515.