Not content with a three volume history of the British punk scene during the 1980s, Ian Glasper now condenses the subsequent decade into another 500 page tome. Hardly awash with household names, Glasper simply lets the musicians tell their own story, with a selection of bands hailing from the different geographical regions of the UK. And the stories are familiar - tales of broken down transit vans and occasional jaunts around the European squat scene, or of mid-week gigs to the proverbial one-man-and-his-dog-on-a-string that vary little from the stories told in the previous books.

Aside from Therapy? and Leatherface, none of the bands covered had much notice in the mainstream and that, perhaps, is Armed With Anger's only weakness - the lack of a wider context. 1991 was, according to Sonic Youth, the 'Year Punk Rock Broke' and yet any developments outwith Glasper's fairly rigid, underground-only scope barely register. No discussion of the wholesale Clash-isms of early Manic Street Preachers, Riot Grrrl or even the multi-platinum success of Green Day and The Offspring and their impact on the mainstream perception of the genre. True, the scenes Glasper chronicles continued despite (or in spite of) the success of Dookie but there is surely scope for asking why Britain has failed to produce any significant punk acts over the last few decades - at a time when interest in the format has hardly been greater.

Nevertheless, Armed With Anger ... - like the previous volumes - is a worthy chronicle of a scene that persisted away from the gaze of the weekly music press and when the seismic changes the internet would have on the industry were only beginning to be felt. This was still a time when fanzines, tape trading and old-fashioned letter writing still mattered, and when life-long friendships could still be forged over a shared love of a right old racket.

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