Former GUNS N’ ROSES manager Alan Niven has filed a lawsuit against the band to prevent them from blocking the release of his new memoir, “Sound N’ Fury: Rock N’ Roll Stories”.

Originally scheduled for a July 5 release, the book has been delayed a couple of times and is presently available for pre-order via Amazon, with a March 31, 2026 release date listed.

In a lawsuit filed on November 3 in the United States District Court for the District of Arizona, Niven claims that GUNS N’ ROSES has “blocked publication of the book through repeated threats to Niven and contact with” publisher ECW Press.

According to the lawsuit, which was supplied to BLABBERMOUTH.NET by Niven‘s publicist, GUNS N’ ROSES wrote a letter in May 2025 “invoking the confidentiality clause in its 1991 buyout agreement with Niven… despite the fact that the agreement was not signed by all of its members; GN’R‘s members have commented publicly on Niven; one member encouraged him to write the book; and he has been speaking about his time in GN’R for over a decade.”

Niven‘s attorney writes in the complaint that “Sound N’ Fury”‘s “publication has been delayed for months, even though it received a favorable review from the Los Angeles Times, and has received many preorders.”

The New Zealand-born Niven, who managed GUNS N’ ROSES from 1985 through 1991, is suing for declaratory judgment of non-enforceability of contract; declaratory judgment of non-breach of contract; and tortious interference with contract or business expectancy.

Niven‘s long career in the music industry started in the early 1970s with Virgin Records in England and continued to the 1980s in California, where he “signed MÖTLEY CRÜE, managed, produced and cowrote for GREAT WHITE, broke popular groups such as BERLIN and DOKKEN, and later produced an acclaimed record with Clarence Clemmons,” according to the lawsuit.

“Sound N’ Fury: Rock N’ Roll Stories” is said to consist of “anecdotes about Niven‘s career, including distributing the first SEX PISTOLS singles in the U.S., cooking a dinner for guitarist Robert Fripp, going to bat for a scruffy musician named Frank Ferranna (later known as Nikki Sixx),and reinventing GREAT WHITE twice. It also includes stories involving the members GN’R, while he represented the five individuals who made up the classic lineup of the band.”

In 1991, a buyout agreement was entered into between Niven and his company, and GUNS N’ ROSES and various companies affiliated with the band. Broadly, the agreement laid out the terms for a parting of the ways between GUNS N’ ROSES and Niven. The agreement contained mutual privacy/confidentiality provisions. In broad strokes, GUNS N’ ROSES and Niven agreed that efforts would be made to maintain the confidentiality of information concerning each other learned during their mutual association, absent certain conditions best characterized as waivers or written permission. The agreement “said nothing about things learned after the parties went their separate ways,” Niven‘s attorney wrote in the complaint. “Finally, the agreement provided that it must be signed by all parties to be effective.”

According to the lawsuit, the buyout agreement between Niven and GUNS N’ ROSES was signed 34 years ago. “At the time, Niven was under severe personal distress because he had been betrayed by his former employee, the band’s lawyer, and his band,” the lawsuit claims. “He was forced to take a buyout that was far less than he would have received had he stayed with GN’R, and he was forbidden forever from talking about his time with GN’R.”