More Angry Young Men

Clinton Heylin is a celebrated Bob Dylan expert, which makes his subsequent concentration on punk rock something of a surprise. But there’s a connection — Dylan shares with the best punk bands a devastating originality and a refusal to toe the established line. It is this free-spirited mentality that clearly attracts Heylin to his subjects, and his admiration for this quality is evident throughout Babylon’s Burning, a complete and authoritative account of the punk and post-punk movement from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s.

We start in the US in 1974 with Television and the Ramones, the earliest incarnations of a movement that cult rock critic Lester Bangs had hoped to instigate as far back as 1971, when he claimed that ‘rock is mainly about asserting yourself way before you know what you’re doing’. But Heylin doesn’t linger state-side, devoting most of this 690-page marathon to UK punk in the late 1970s.