Longtime UK-based journalist Mick Wall has written the following report on GUNS N' ROSES' new album, Chinese Democracy for Timesonline.co.uk:

The most expensive album ever made. The longest album ever made. The most over the top album ever made . . . It hasn’t even been released yet but the stories about the making — and endless remaking — of the new GUNS N' ROSES record, Chinese Democracy, have been circulating for years. Indeed, almost £10 million and nearly 15 years later, and, according to a breathless press release on Wednesday, finally to be released on November 24, it has assumed almost mythical status.

But while the stories are endless — delayed by a revolving door of group members, producers, record company chiefs, personal gurus and the wildly unpredictable day-to-day whims of the group’s extraordinary leader, the singer W. Axl Rose — the reasons for the album’s extraordinarily painful creation are harder to pin down.

Begun back in 1995, when the original line-up of the band was still more or less intact, initial problems centred around Rose’s fractured relationship with Slash, the lead guitarist. Slash was aghast first to have his songs unilaterally rejected by the singer, then to find that Rose had hired a replacement guitarist, an old school chum with no previous big-time experience named Paul Huge, without informing the rest of the band.

“I was suicidal,” said Slash. “If I’d had a gun with me at that time, I probably would have done myself in. If I’d had a half-ounce of heroin with me, I probably just would’ve gone. It was heavy.” So heavy that one by one over the next two years he was followed out the door by every other original member.

Left alone to his own devices, Rose embarked on an extraordinary decade-long journey during which more than a dozen musicians were hired, fired, or eventually walked out, exhausted by the endless delays.

Working from a massive soundstage in California, he instructed studio engineers to keep recording any ideas the various musicians he’d invited into the fold came up with. At one point he was being sent up to five CDs a week with various different mixes of proposed songs. Eventually, a stack of more than 1,000 CDs and DAT cassettes had built up, all painstakingly filed and labelled. “It was like the Library of Congress in there,” says one studio worker.

Deeply affected by the death of his mother, Sharon, from cancer, in 1996, and his collaborator West Arkeen, from a drug overdose, Rose also became a recluse, refusing to leave his Malibu mansion. He kept tanks of exotic spiders and reptiles for company, adopting bizarre disguises whenever he went out.

All employees were required to sign confidentiality agreements containing stiff penalties if breached. They also had to submit a photograph of themselves which Rose would then offer to a personal guru, nicknamed Yoda by his road crew, for “psychic inspection” to reveal their true motives, strengths and weaknesses. Even photographs of an employee’s children were requested on occasion.

Read more here.

'Chinese Democracy', is currently streaming on BraveWords.com's KnuckleTracks Online Audio Player - head to the left-hand-side of BraveWords.com to launch the player.

Chinese Democracy, will see the light of day on November 23rd - a rare Sunday release date rather than the usual Tuesday in North America. In the US, Chinese Democracy will be exclusively available at Best Buy. BestBuy.com lists the following formats: CD (Cover A), CD (Cover B), Vinyl (Cover A), Vinyl (Cover B).

Universal Australia have scheduled Chinese Democracy for both physical and digital release on November 22nd.

Chinese Democracy will feature the following tracks: 'Chinese Democracy', 'Shackler's Revenge', 'Better', 'Street Of Dreams', 'If The World', 'There Was A Time', 'Catcher N' The Rye', 'Scraped', 'Riad N' The Bedovins', 'Sorry', 'I.R.S.', 'Madagascar', 'This I Love', 'Prostitute'.

Do want to stream beside Guns N' Roses on BraveWords.com's KnuckleTracks Online Audio Player?

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