I feel like I’ve read some of this elsewhere, but Frank Owen was there and does a fine job describing the mayhem and machinations out of which came The Buzzcocks, The Fall, Joy Division, Morrisey and The Worst, among others. Some of it is the big picture, but there is also the personal:

“The Perry Boys had snuck up behind me and one of them had hit me over the head with a specially sharpened Levi belt buckle, leaving me lying on the concrete in a halo of my own blood. They probably would have kicked me into a coma if it wasn’t for my PVC-clad friend Denise Shaw, who stood over six feet tall in heels and dressed like a fetish model. She saw the incident and rushed over to fight off my attackers with her handbag.”

The Perry Boys were kids from the Council Houses, who hated the punks. Mark E. Smith wrote a song for the Fall about them: