When I was at primary school out in the boondocks the "bad kids" fell into one of three camps when it came to the bands they claimed to love. They were either fans of old- school rockers AC/DC or notorious hedonists Guns N' Roses or the new raw-power kids on the block, Nirvana.

Casual day would see them donning their band shirts and having heated arguments about whether the ''best guitarist in the world" moniker should be awarded to Angus Young or Slash - anyone who advocated for Eric Clapton would be laughed out of the playground.

As the school nerd I never participated in these debates and when I went to high school I ended up being a Nirvana acolyte - complete with T-shirt, hole-pocked jersey, torn sweat pants and long hair.

As a grunge fan, Guns N' Roses formed no part in my thinking - some band with a shaggy-haired guitarist and an erratically behaved lead singer who'd been big once but by the mid-1990s were a joke outfit to be lumped together in the same 1980s crowd as hair bands like Poison and Mtley Cre, the only vestiges of their existence occasional news stories about the bad behaviour of their increasingly pudgy lead singer Axl Rose.

But as Mick Wall's definitive biography Last of the Giants: The True Story of Guns N' Roses shows, there was a time when GN'R were the biggest band in the world, the last of the great hedonistic, sex drugs and rock 'n' roll groups who grabbed the baton from The Rolling Stones, The Who and Led Zeppelin and took it kicking and screaming into the 1980s before strangling it to death and claiming their place as the murderers of a lifestyle and attitude that no longer exists in the music world.

They did this not just by virtue of their drug-fuelled hedonism, but through their commitment to the music in a career trajectory that saw them push themselves from hustling street kids in LA in the early 1980s to headlining the biggest venues in the world in the early 1990s, before drugs and personal rivalries tore them apart.

Wall, who was singled out as a traitor by Axl Rose in the song Get in the Ring, was once a close confidant of the band and here, through his years of interviews with Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan, Steven Adler and - up to the point at which they were no longer talking - Axl, paints an intimate, multi-faceted and easy to enjoy portrait of what it was that elevated the band above their LA contemporaries, drove them to the top of the world stage and then plunged them down to the bottom.

The arguments on playgrounds in faraway South Africa were the result of a lot of hard work, a lot of egotistical vision on the part of Rose and a lot of other things that few of the band members can remember thanks to the copious amounts of substances they consumed.

With all the thrills, spills, horrors and unfortunate tragedies that used to be the staple of the golden age of rock it's a book that makes an excellent argument for Wall's case that there never was a band quite like GN'R and there may well never be again - hungry young men with axes to grind and chips on their shoulders who never gave a damn whether you liked them or not but still can't believe that so many did.

Read it and shake your head in disbelief or replay the albums in a wave of nostalgia or just to regret that your kids are wearing nothing more offensive than Justin Bieber T-shirts to school on casual day.

'Last of the Giants: The True Story of Guns N' Roses' by Mick Wall published by Trapeze, available at Exclusive Books for R323.

This article was originally published in The Times

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Book review: 'The True Story of Guns N' Roses' will rock your world - Times LIVE