From 1987 to 1990, journalist Mick Wall says he covered GUNS N' ROSES more - and more seriously - than any other journalist outside of America, and has authored multiple books on the band, including last year's W.A.R. The Unauthorized Biography of William Axl Rose. Axl Rose even wrote him into the song 'Get In The Ring'.

These qualifications and others make Wall an authority on all things Axl. Eliot Van Buskirk of Wired.com caught up with him to find out why Guns N' Roses waited so long to release Chinese Democracy, why Rose decided to release it now, whether there will be another GNR album and why Axl doesn't like him anymore.

Here are a few excerpts from the chat:

Wired.com: How are you?

Mick Wall: "Good, good. Everybody's getting excited about Chinese Democracy - well not me, but most people (both laugh).'

Wired.com: Why not you?

Mick: "Oh, I'm kidding. Why not me? Because I've been a music business professional for 31 years. I'm not going to get excited about something like this. Also, nine of these 14 tracks, I've had them on CD since 2006, and they're identical, it seems to me, to the ones on the finished album - and all the best tracks as well, so whoever leaked them onto the internet did a really good job about picking the best ones."

Wired.com: How did you have those since 2006?

Mick: "Have I got that wrong? Was it maybe the beginning of 2007? I feel like I had them since 2006, because that's when I was writing my book about Axl, W.A.R. So I feel like I must have had them then, because I remember listening to them as I was writing those bits of the book that deal with the making of Chinese Democracy. Maybe I'm just not remembering properly, maybe I got them a little later. But certainly [I've had them since] at least the beginning of 2007 for sure."

Wired.com: Okay, because I saw it leak onto a blog in June of 2008.

Mick: "Oh, no, no, way before that."

Wired.com: This was also nine songs, so it's probably the same...

Mick: "No, no, this was way, way, way before that. You've got to remember as well that there have been versions of this on CD kicking around since 2001 or 2002. There's one record company executive, who I dare not name, who was playing privately for journalists in London in the summer of 2007, his version of the album, which dated back to when he worked on the project -- 2001 or 2002, when it was first on the schedules to be released. And these were finished tracks. I mean, this album's been ready to go. I'm assuming there are tracks on this album that were made since those days, because I never heard of 'Scraped' before, or 'Shackler's Revenge', or anything like that.

But the fact is, this album's been ready to go for a really, really long time. Even Axl, at one point, talked about there being at least 72 finished tracks, that there were at least three albums' worth of material, all this kind of stuff. He was playing it himself for people at his home, and on the road, so this stuff has been around a very long time. The thing I would take most from that is the fact that it was never, I don't think, musical reasons that were holding this album up anyway. It was all to do with Axl's own personal issues, if you want to put it like that.

Wired.com: Interesting. That is interesting, because the story that I've been thinking about is, "well, he's a perfectionist."

Mick: "(Draws a deep breath) When I was writing the book, I interviewed a psychologist who told me that the worst thing you can give a control freak, which is what Axl appears to be, is give them total control. Because it induces a kind of stasis in them where they literally will never finish anything, because it will never be quite right. And I think that is a huge part of what's been going on here. If Guns N' Roses were still Guns N' Roses -- in other words, if it were still five guys that started out equal in the band, this album so would have been released years and years ago, and then they'd have gone on and made another one, and another one. It isn't Guns N' Roses; it's in effect an Axl Rose solo album, Axl and a bunch of hired hands -- very talented hired hands, but guys who have been hired to do what he tells them to do. Otherwise he'd still be with the real band, who weren't so easy to tell what to do.

He's had it all his own way for years and years. And the result is, listening to it, it's incredibly overproduced, overreaching, almost self-pitying, a lot of the tracks, but also an album that seems to try to deal with a lot of questions to do with the past, and provide a certain amount of rationale behind why he is who he is, and no one ever really understands, and all this kind of stuff. As a solo album, it's a really interesting piece of work. But if you need to look at it as a Guns N' Roses album -- and we have to because that's how they're selling it -- I don't know. I don't think people got into Guns N' Roses so they could listen to an album like this. I think they loved Appetite for Destruction because there was something in it reminded them of LED ZEPPELIN, reminded them of THE STOOGES, reminded them of wild, out-there music that kind of broke all the rules.

And I think on Use Your Illusion [it was] the same thing. Even though the whole ELTON JOHN/QUEEN influence that Axl has made itself more apparent on the Use Your Illusion albums, it was still Guns N' Roses. You still had some fantastic guitar playing from Slash, and real cohesive band performances -- it sounded like a group still. And I don't think this does. It's very hard for me to truly view [Chinese Democracy] as a Guns N' Roses album when there's really only one guy from Guns N' Roses on it."

Read more at Wired.com.

(Thanks Gnrdaily.com)