Andy Beckett

Eighteen years ago, in a pub in Darlington, someone I associated with fashion and clubbing but not anything as sedentary as reading told me she had just read the best book ever written. I had never heard of Trainspotting. It had been published the previous summer, and was still in the early stages of its journey from cult status to ubiquity. Soon afterwards I too found myself improbably...

Early on in this book there is a photograph of the British architect Peter Cook’s living-room ‘circa 1970’. Cook is now Sir Peter, co-designer of the rather bland main stadium for the 2012 London Olympics. But he was a young adventurer back then, a founder of the archetypal 1960s and 1970s avant-garde architects’ collective Archigram, which came up with never built but...

In 1976, while punk was still in its early stages, Newman and three others formed a band called Wire. The bassist, Graham Lewis, ‘a fashion graduate doing freelance design for London boutiques’, tells Reynolds they chose the name for its ‘graphic quality’. At first, such signs of ambition beyond the usual rock moves - Wire also liked to stand still onstage, like mannequins - were missed. Wire’s short, dense songs were misinterpreted as standard punk rants. But as their tunes grew longer and stranger during 1977 and 1978, people began to realise Wire belonged to another tribe. A baffled NME reviewer, presented with a Wire LP partly inspired by a Radio Four programme about a holly-chewing bug called the serpentine miner, decided they were hippies. This was not quite true: Wire’s sound was too steely and their hair was too short.

“Throughout, there is an intriguing tension between the book’s desire, approaching that of a Thomas Pynchon novel, to set wheels turning within wheels, to present a political world of infinite complexity and, ultimately, chaos, and its desire for order, both organisational and moral. Peace loves describing meetings. He lingers over the rituals of failing negotiations between the union and the government, the overlit rooms and bad coffee – the fatalistic cups of tea of his previous books replaced by something more jittery – and the pulling of levers in the strike and strike-breaking machines.”