You can appreciate, reading What Have We Got?, why the subculture it focuses on has rarely given itself to book-bound overviews. Anyone interested in the ‘skinhead’ youth movement can consult scattered literature from its six decades to date, while the associated enclave of punk rock which formed in the late 1970s and came to be known, self-parodically, as Oi! continues to thrive. Nailing down the hard facts of its history is more of a minefield.

Oi!, which spread from southern England across Britain and worldwide, remains for various reasons distrustful of outsiders: the opening to What Have We Got? finds author Simon Spence tentatively ingratiating himself with Crown Court, a new-school UK band. You might know Spence as a biographer of more mainstream rock figures; as far as Oi! goes, he enjoys listening to the music, but by his own admission it’s not his scene.

Still, from a wider perspective, he can write about it in an accessible way (dubbing one of its great bands, the Cockney Rejects, Britain’s equivalent of the New York Dolls), and converse with notable figures with aplomb that outstrips his credentials. Some interviews which don’t happen involve vaguely farcical circumstances. Roddy Moreno, of Cardiff’s pioneering antifascist Oi! band The Oppressed, is a big miss – Spence doesn’t recognise him across a room and then just never follows it up – and Garry Bushell, the music press’ biggest Oi! advocate before his later career as a professional tabloid homophobe, assumes bad faith on the author’s part and shuts down discussion.

There is, to be clear, an exceptional amount of unsavoury detail in any honest history of the genre, and it’s not surprising that some involved would wish it memory-holed. From proto-Oi! chart-botherers Sham 69 onwards, the scene was attractive to the far right, often with lyrics which seemed to serve as beacons (even bands broadly considered left-wing, like Tyneside’s Angelic Upstarts, had this tendency). In time, and as the earlier wave of Oi! bands evaporated, the fascism not only became more extreme and violent but was pretty much the only game in town.

Moreno and others around the globe have done much to redress this over the decades, which is to say that someone like Simon Spence is now placed to pen an overview that – while candid as it recounts repulsive behaviour – can feature some of Oi!’s significant faces without it being a total gallery of shitbags.