By Phil Strongman. Orion Books, 289 pp, $37.95, hardcover

Phil Strongman's book is subtitled A History of Punk, and that's precisely what it purports to be: a chronological detailing of punk's first wave, the pop-cultural firestorm that raged in London and New York between 1976 and '79. As such, it focuses mainly on the Sex Pistols and their travails, from the band's assembly by manager/provocateur Malcolm McLaren (who designed the Pistols to be an anarchic answer to the Bay City Rollers' teen-beat populism) to its shuddering collapse at the end of an ill-advised U.S. tour.

This is delicious fodder for storytelling, and Strongman provides an admirable survey of the movement's immediate predecessors, including the Stooges, the Velvet Underground, the MC5, and the New York Dolls–a brief involvement with whom gave the ever-scheming McLaren his first tantalizing taste of rock music's power to incite outrage in right-thinking citizens.

The trouble with Pretty Vacant, though, is that it seems unnecessary. These tales have been told many times over, and by writers of greater talent. Jon Savage's England's Dreaming, published in 1991, covers the same ground in a much more exhaustive and insightful fashion, and it remains the definitive work on the subject. Greil Marcus's Lipstick Traces isn't purely about punk by any means, but the author's efforts to place the Pistols and company in the context of other 20th-century cultural movements, including Dadaism and the Situationist International, are compelling and compulsively readable. If you demand the story delivered straight from the barrels of the Pistols themselves, both singer John Lydon and founding bassist Glen Matlock have penned memoirs, and Julien Temple's riveting documentary The Filth and the Fury is rife with firsthand remembrances.

Apart from redundancy, Pretty Vacant's most egregious failing might be Strongman's tendency to report damning hearsay as fact. He repeats the oft-told–and much-disputed–story about Sid Vicious inadvertently blinding a girl in one eye by shattering a pint glass against a pillar at the 100 Club. Three decades later, this elusive one-eyed woman still has never materialized, and the story has attained urban-legend status. But Strongman relates it without so much as a caveat about its dubious nature. Worse, he implicates drug-dealer-cum-actor Rockets Redglare in the stabbing death of Vicious's American junkie paramour, Nancy Spungen, and in knowingly selling the ex-Pistol a lethal dose of heroin. While this might very well be how events transpired, the only people who could dispute the author's version are deceased. Given that the tragic story of Spungen and Vicious remains one of rock 'n' roll's great unsolved mysteries, it's bewildering that Strongman doesn't so much as acknowledge that other theories exist, or that Redglare was never convicted, or even tried, for his alleged crimes. All of which throws the accuracy of the rest of Pretty Vacant into doubt.

It's too bad, really, because Strongman has undeniable punk credentials. During the initial London explosion, he worked at Acme Attractions (a hipster clothing store that was a chief rival of McLaren and Vivienne Westwood's boutiques) and he saw the Pistols at the 100 Club in '76. The guy was even an extra in The Great Rock 'n' Roll Swindle, Temple's other Sex Pistols movie. As a witness to British punk's first fumbling steps, Strongman surely has a few anecdotes of his own to relate. Perhaps he should have written a memoir and left the historical documentation to the Jon Savages of the world.