There are barely 48 hours to go before the release of perhaps the most widely anticipated album in rock music history. Yet its creator — Axl Rose — is nowhere to be found.

According to one gossip columnist, the 46-year-old recluse was last seen at a restaurant called The Bagel Café in Las Vegas. As usual, there were no photographs to prove it.

But it is not just Rose's whereabouts that remain uncertain before Chinese Democracy is released. Rumours were also circulating last night about a rift between the volatile rocker and those who manage his business affairs — in particular his Los Angeles-based managers, Irving Azoff and Andy Gould.

Larry Solters, Rose's public relations chief, seemingly hired to avoid relations with the public, declined to clarify the situation. “Not able to assist. Sorry,” he e-mailed The Times.

And so it appears that Chinese Democracy, an album that took more than a decade to make and cost an estimated $928,571 per song, will be released in precisely the same way it was conceived — amid chaos and acrimony, and with the sole remaining member of the original Guns N' Roses in hiding, most probably somewhere within his 2.3-acre clifftop estate on Latigo Canyon Road in Malibu, about an hour from Los Angeles.

The mansion, bought in 1992 for $3.6 million, according to LA's public records, affords a view so impressive that it is almost laughable: 180 degrees of Pacific surf, shimmering in Malibu's late November sun. Yesterday, all that could be seen from outside was a huge white gate, an intercom system, a military-grade satellite dish poking up through the trees and a couple of SUVs parked outside.

None of the drama that has surrounded Rose's release of Chinese Democracy is likely to come as a surprise to his former bandmates — in particular the iconic guitarist of Guns N' Roses, Slash, who left the band in the mid-1990s with the bass player Duff McKagan and the drummer Matt Sorum (who had replaced the drug-addicted Steven Adler).

In an interview last year, Slash described how in the early days of Guns N' Roses, he once confronted the Indiana-born singer about falling asleep on his grandmother's sofa, leaving her with nowhere to sit. “We got in the car [on the way to the recording studio] and I very delicately put it to him that [his hogging the sofa] was sort of rude,” recalled the British-born Slash, 43. “His reaction was to jump out of the car. It was going 35-40mph. From that point on, it was kid gloves.”

Rose, a former church choirboy who was beaten and sexually abused as a child, also displayed all the classic symptoms of egomania, turning up to gigs two hours late (in a Rolling Stone interview he blamed this on weak ankles) and losing his temper with audience members, once provoking a riot in St Louis, Missouri, that destroyed a new arena.

His personal life was no duller. In 1990 Rose proposed to the subject of the song Sweet Child o' Mine, Erin Everly (daughter of Don Everly), after reportedly informing her he had a gun in his car and would kill himself if she refused. The union lasted a month.

When it came to recording Chinese Democracy, Rose's eccentricities were almost on a par with those of Brian Wilson, of the Beach Boys, who spent 38 years making the album Smile. The singer employed a spiritual therapist named Sharon “Yoda” Maynard to vet employees; he fired eight guitarists (including Brian May, of Queen) and installed a chicken coop in his studio. Hence the reason no one thought that the album would ever get made — including the soft drinks company Dr Pepper, which promised every American a free can if the day arrived.

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