Or A Pre-Punk History For A Post-Punk World, as the sub-title would have it. "Modern music begins with the Velvets," the late great Lester Bangs is quoted at the beginning of this epic, "and the implications and influence of what they did seem to go on forever." The four-piece Velvet Underground existed for a mere handful of years in the late 60s and early 70s (although to their great detriment losing principal member John Cale along the way), but their brief and explosive willingness to explore extremity, perversity and experimentalism, and the rejection of 60s rock-'n-roll values - along with more traditionalist if equally abrasive contemporaries like MC5 and The Stooges - found resonance in a new core of young musicians centred mainly on a vibrant New York stage.

From The Velvets To The Voidoids in an attempt by author Heylin to nail down the Punk/New Wave scenes (he is scrupulous in marking them out as separate in his introduction) of the 70s in to some kind of cohesive whole principally through the main players of the period. In its way, Heylin is attempting to do for US Punk what author Jon Savage did for its UK equivalent in his superb England's Dreaming (1991), albeit with a less colourful band of desperados, and a rather drier, more journalistic approach to the material.

The key differences between the UK and US scenes were marked, not least with the average ages of the latter being well in to the late-twenties while their transatlantic cousins took up thrashing instruments with youthful zeal. Nor were their motivations by and large social or political - the two formative driving factors behind bands like The Clash and Sex Pistols. There is no sense from this story that this pre-Punk was born out of any one event or a kickback against authority - in that sense then, the birth of the American bands was more a musical revolution than the corresponding British one. Indeed, from very early in the book the majority of the players are busy citing bands like the Velvets and Stooges as influences, but alongside them the discordant free-jazz of Ornette Coleman, John Coltrane and in particular Albert Ayler as the major motivating factors, although curiously on the whole not towards a jazz-based music, but a mutated form of rock-'n-roll that preserved the experimentalism and dynamics of those great pioneers, but allied to guitar, bass and drums.

If there is one salient difference between Heylin and Savage's approach, then it is one forced upon the former by circumstance. The UK scene was always, for better or worse, centred on the one seminal band - the Sex Pistols - and in that sense the history of Punk runs concurrently with the history of the band. In the corresponding world no one band commanded centre-stage in quite the same way, wielded quite the same, albeit haphazard, authority. Perhaps as close as we get were Television, formed by Velvets/Ayler fan Tom Verlaine, who transplanted to New York and eventually recorded the seminal Marquee Moon, before making an ill-stared follow-up and disintegrating. (The band recently reformed and recorded their third, eponymous, LP fourteen years late.) A relatively static core, around them come and go the other prime motivators of the period, from one-time member Richard Hell (who would later form the Voidoids), the wildly erratic poet/performer Patti Smith, Cleveland's premiere art-rockers Pere Ubu, proto-noisists Suicide, to those braking on a world stage: Blondie (for a long time, a joke with insiders), and arch-academics Talking Heads, who formed a rather unlikely touring partnership with the gabba gabba hey of The Ramones. On a more tangential course, the New York Dolls took inspiration from the short but colourful Brit-Glam, and were always a band whose fame outstripped their achievements, coincidentally forming the only positive link with the fledgling British scene (although bands from both countries would eventually tour together), by being managed (read, dressed) by self-publicist supreme Malcolm McLaren, pre-Sex Pistols.

The prominent split in the twin inchoate scenes, however, offers itself as a rather non-explicit element in Heylin's text, but is underlined by the detailed discography he uses as an appendix. There is no clear inference that this loose amalgam of rather disparate bands centred around CBGB's and Max's in New York were little more than a largely self-consuming, self-diverting assembly. In the UK clear lines can be extrapolated that link the Sex Pistols, The Clash and their ilk to the likes of Joy Division and beyond, but Heylin's is a very insular operation, playing virtually to itself, with the occasional breakaway - The Heartbreakers supporting the Pistols, Talking Heads touring the UK - with no sense that these bands acted in any noticeable way to influence anyone else, nor that they were actually even that noticed outside city limits. There is, for example, no equivalent to the fury that greeted the Pistols infamous appearance on the late Bill Grundy's chat show that effectively took the underground movement overground.

And in a sense it is that one fact that elevates the Savage book to far and away the most important of the pair. Although Heylin documents his chosen field with skill, the final book for all its episodic nature being immensely readable and informative, never offers any clue that this material has a value beyond the obvious. Where Savage cleverly exploits his telling of the Sex Pistols' story to narrate the story of Punk, and through it examine the Britain that spawned the apparently harsh, disruptive movement that has since had an incalculable effect on music, there is no sign that Heylin has the skill, or indeed the will, to take the reader from the micro to the macro, and that is the essential flaw - a three page epilogue that seeks to bring stories up to date is perfunctory and almost insultingly irrelevant.

For all its shortcomings though, From The Velvets To The Voidoids is a valuable step in the right direction, to be filed alongside England's Dreaming (but certainly not to be read in preference) as part of the small but steadily growing library prepared to wake up to the fact that the musical revolution of the mid-70s was at least on a par with that of the 50s, and displaying the admirable sense to consign the much overworked, overrated 60s to the distant past. And even more especially now that 1993 dawns with the news of the reformation (however brief) of the Velvet Underground.