There are many ways to write a rock biography. Perhaps the commonest are the authorised biography and the unauthorised biography. The first promises access, but most often delivers a limited view of its subject, the writer steered away from sensitive, private matters to present the artist as unequivocally successful. The second promises to dig the dirt on its subject but, lacking access, often rubs up against other limits, relying on distant informants and files of press cuttings. In his exhaustive study of Henry Cow, a 1970s rock group (dare one say ‘progressive’ rock group?), Benjamin Piekut draws on both agpproaches to enhance the typical academic or critical biography. As we might expect, he draws on theory to understand his subject in ways hitherto unconsidered: insights that circle around the sociocultural and political relevance of rock music. Piekut blends press coverage and extensive interviews with those in the orbit of the group as well as remarkable access to members of the group itself: individual interviews, group interviews, access to diaries and musicians’ personal archives – very little seems to be withheld from him. Nor does the reader feel that Piekut has been required to self-censor any of his account; the book abounds with disputes between members of the group. There are frequent passages that are uncomfortably intimate, detailing not only aesthetic and political arguments but also, almost as if we are reading an account of the excesses of a stereotypical rock group, tales of who slept with whom. This is no tabloid exposé, however, rather it is a vivid (perhaps too vivid at times) study of a group whose lives, whose ‘project’ and whose music were all rich in complexity and contradiction.

Henry Cow may well be unfamiliar to the majority of this journal's readership. They were a group that flourished in the first half of the 1970s, releasing only a handful of albums, famed (if famed at all) primarily for their fusion of radical left-wing politics and often fearsomely complex music, merging highly structured compositions with free improvisation. They toured the UK to small audiences. Piekut cites an Arts Council report of the groups’ subsidised UK tour in 1978, where they played to ‘about fifteen hundred people’ (p. 366). That is not an average number per concert, but total audience numbers across nine dates. Their audiences were larger in continental Europe, it seems, but for the whole of their career the group was effectively impoverished, recycling and rebuilding their transport and their equipment to struggle to the next gig (which, as Piekut recounts during their Italian tour of 1975, would often be under-publicised or cancelled).

To judge from his introduction, Piekut seems to have found it difficult to convince academic audiences (we presume at conference presentations) of the significance of the group. He lists three questions asked of him that he clearly finds frustrating: of the large audiences to which the group played at festivals across Europe, ‘were all those people really there to hear Henry Cow?’ Of the group's commitment to the politicising of rock: ‘But they came from [the University of] Cambridge!’ About their Communist politics: ‘How could they have taken themselves so seriously?’ (p. viii). I would have liked to read Piekut's responses to these questions, but he chooses not to respond, perhaps not wishing to rise to what he sees as bait.

Nevertheless, Piekut's richly nuanced account of the group is, as far as I am aware, an unprecedentedly detailed case study of the life of a rock group: learning about the business at the same time as they seek to be apart from it; struggling to become a professional group that makes a living out of resolutely challenging and uncommercial music. The contradictions within the group's politics are laid bare. The attempts to work collectively – whether in their business affairs or in their creative endeavours (collective improvisation played a large part in the group's work), even attempts at collective mixing in the recording studio – are set against stories that tell of the dominance of the men in the group over the women, and the ironies (delusions, even) exposed by a group whose core members came from highly privileged backgrounds (various public schools, one member even having had a governess at home). Moreover, Henry Cow hoped to make music, as various members attest, ‘for working people’ (p. 203) through a popular form: ‘rock music is for everyone’ (p. 208); ‘we want to reach as large an audience as possible’ (p. 207). Yet, as Piekut shows, the uncompromising complexity of the music consigned Henry Cow, in the UK at least, to marginal status in the rock culture of the 1970s.

As with most, if not all, rock biographies, its author is clearly a fan of the group's music. Yet that is not his only reason for writing. For Piekut Henry Cow stands as an exemplar of what he terms ‘feral experimentalism’ in his introduction and a ‘vernacular avant-garde’ in his afterword. By ‘feral’ he seems to mean a music that is somehow untamed by the structures of the academy, one that found its cultural accreditation through rock, among other popular forms. The notion of a vernacular avant-garde I find less clear. For Piekut, the vernacular is ‘participatory and circulatory … its discourse … lives in mass-market music periodicals, newspapers and, latterly, in specialist, small-run magazines’ (p. 401). To ascribe such a wide discursive space to the vernacular threatens to drain the term of all meaning, unless we are to understand what it seems to exclude: the academy, once again. Piekut's interest in the vernacular is also suggestive of the audience he has in mind for this book. It seems that he is trying to write for both the fans (he often adopts a vernacular style, not always convincingly) and for scholars: his ‘note to the scholarly reader’ warns us that the ‘customary survey of the contemporary literature’ will be reserved for the afterword (xiii). Yet theoretical perspectives appear throughout the book, as do sophisticated analyses of the group's music, both of which would surely be forbidding (if not incomprehensible) to the ‘ordinary’ (vernacular?) fan. His language at times verges on the unnecessarily florid, thesaurus-like in its turns of phrase: ‘eupeptic groove’ (p. 86), ‘wanderative dawdles’ (p. 87), ‘ferine’ (p. 118) (why not feral?), ‘contraviviality’ (p. 243), ‘ephemeron’ (p. 283). And why is the British public-school system uniformly considered ‘depraved’ (p. 31)?

The hybrid nature of Piekut's approach to rock biography remains, as I have already noted, remarkable and revealing. As both an academic and a longstanding listener to Henry Cow (is fan the right word here?), perhaps I am its ideal reader. Others may find the book fascinating and frustrating in varying measures.