Back when I should have been studying for my O-levels, I, like a lot of earnest teenagers and bedroom bards in the 1980s, spent much of my free time writing and assembling badly photocopied fanzines. They had Latin titles, images plundered from magazines I'd stolen from the local doctor's waiting room, and featured interviews with obscure bands such as the Klaxon 5 (whose "Never Underestimate the Ignorance of the Rich" I'd heard on John Peel's British Forces Broadcasting Service show), French chanson and future Eric Cantona biographer Louis Philippe, and an unruly gaggle of Mancunians called Happy Mondays, whose members mostly cracked feeble gags about Erasure being gay.

These fanzines, like thousands of others being Letraset and mimeographed up and down the country, were part of an economy of passion. Experiments in process, they were swapped as often as they were sold. They championed bands largely ignored by the big music weeklies in London. Sometimes they were adorned with free flexi-discs, a format seen as risible in terms of fashion or commerce.

Independent music in the late 1970s and 1980s  an era before the arrival of cable television, the internet and untold "audio distribution platforms"  generated fierce arguments. Like the fanzines which operated as its fevered theoretical wing, it was a key element in a broad cultural front  represented also by student-grant-funded university education, the ability to live on the dole for much of one's 20s, regional leftism and a still-functional alternative press  that saw itself as being ideological as much as merely sonic. Johnny Marr, explaining why the Smiths signed to Rough Trade, claimed: "You were either mainstream or by definition you were against the government."

Marr, effortlessly eloquent, is one of the few interviewees in How Soon Is Now? to talk at length about the relationship between independent music and the political landscapes that incubated or gave urgency to it. This 600-page group biography of some of the most prominent labels of the past 35 years  Factory (home to Joy Division), Rough Trade (the Smiths), Postcard (Orange Juice, Josef K), Mute (Depeche Mode), 4AD (the Pixies), Creation (Oasis), Warp (Aphex Twin) and Domino (Arctic Monkeys)  is, as its subtitle suggests, keen to refute the charge that independent music is a haven for wallflowers and ascetics.

Instead, it talks up hedonism, teenage kicks, outsize egos. Here's Creation's boss, Alan McGee, declaring, "I got into music to have a mansion, take drugs and shag beautiful women." Here's Vaughan Oliver, the 4AD designer who drew on Tarkovsky's Stalker for the Cocteau Twins' Head Over Heels sleeve, recalling the late 80s when the label had its own drug dealer, employees were hoovering up cocaine from printing machines, and he would pop a few Es before sliding naked down the glass roof of his studio. And here's Blast First's Paul Smith getting dewy-eyed about how the photocopier at Rough Trade was used to chop up speed rather than collate press releases. At times, you have to remind yourself you're not reading Nuts.

How Soon Is Now? has little to say about aesthetics. Writers such as Robert Barry have argued that the rough-hewn sloppiness of certain strands of independent music creates a "sense of unfinishedness in the sound of the records that cannot help but draw the listener in, inviting them to fill in the blanks with their own imagination". King though, drawing perhaps on his experience of co-founding the Bristol-based label Planet (whose bands included the under-rated Movietone and Flying Saucer Attack), is more concerned with the efforts of artists and labels to build up record sales. That they made up almost 30 per cent of the music market by the early 1990s  and even today punch above their weight  is the story he's keenest to tell.

This is fine, but given the number of books that have appeared on independent labels in recent years  among them James Nice's Shadowplayers (about Factory), Neil Taylor's Document and Eyewitness (Rough Trade), David Cavanagh's The Creation Records Story, Rob Young's volume on Warp  I wonder if it's enough. King pays righteous respect to lesser-known label bosses such as él's Mike Alway, whose wonderfully bizarre roster (including the Klaxon 5 and Louis Philippe) was more influenced by Jenny Agutter than JG Ballard, but he could and should have advanced a broader vision of independent music than this collection of already canonised giants.

A more pluralistic history, though perhaps less commercially attractive, would have made room for labels such as Crass, which was known to pay 100 per cent royalties to artists, kept prices very low and was animated by anarchist principles; the folk label Topic, founded in 1939 as an offshoot of the Workers' Music Association; the jazz label Incus; and Touch, a still-flourishing label from the early 80s, whose distinctive sleeve art and experimental roster deserve wider recognition. This list could go on. The music these labels produced is far from the strummy geezers-with-guitars form of indie. It is at once stuckist and experimental, wilfully anti-commercial, not easily assimilable by advertisers and lifestyle marketers. It is, in a sense, a deeply independent alternative to what is now energetically marketed as "Independent Music".

Considered alongside DIY labels such as the Desperate Bicycles' Refill Records, which encouraged musicians to think of labels  even indie labels  as cultural gatekeepers and borderline parasites, and urged them to take the means of production into their own hands, the outfits King discusses seem very trad. The stories he tells about Rough Trade staff using Throbbing Gristle records to empty their crowded stores or giving away Arthur Russell LPs as freebies are at once funny and dispiriting.

The strangest omission in How Soon Is Now? is race. With the exception of Factory's co-founder Alan Erasmus (who's not interviewed), there are scant references to any non-white people. But lovers rock, drum'n'bass and dubstep labels are just as independent as those peddling, say, power-pop or shoegaze: how is it that such important labels as Morgan Khan's StreetSounds, 4-Hero's Reinforced, Metalheadz, to say nothing of the raucous and huge-selling bhangra being issued by Multitone in the 1980s, can go uncommemorated?

The rhythmic and sonic innovations they unleashed have formed the soundtrack to the lives of many hundreds of thousands of Britons. As such, their commercial and creative nous deserves better than to be treated as tributaries from which "intelligent dance music" labels such as Warp or the Aphex Twin's Rephlex get to reap the greatest dividends. If "indie" today has become a meaningless adjective, as King claims in his introduction, it's in large part because even its proselytisers have allowed its teeming ecologies to degenerate into monocultural sterility.

How Soon Is Now?, an affectionate and entertaining read to the last, ends in 2005, just as digital distribution  legal and illegal  is becoming ubiquitous. Many of the labels it celebrates still flourish. But if they closed down, would it matter? Duration in itself is not a virtue. Perhaps record labels, like little magazines or small poetry presses, should be seen as unstable coalitions  of friends, ambitions, good timing  whose value lies in how brightly, not how long, they glow. I'd have liked King to discuss not only that question, but the role fanzines  a species of independent discourse  played in developing independent music, as well as what he thinks "mainstream" and "non-mainstream" mean in a musically fragmented era. Someone else will have to write that book.

 Sukhdev Sandhu's Night Haunts is published by Verso.

An exhaustive chronicle of the labels that drove independent music for 30 years, Richard King's prodigiously researched book includes everything one could wish to know about the mayhem, rebellion and anti-corporate idealism of indie culture. While there are colourful anecdotes about artists of variable talent  the Smiths, New Order, Sonic Youth, the Jazz Defektors  it's the eccentrics, misfits and sociopaths operating behind the scenes who take centre stage. The Rough Trade empire alone is revealed to be mind-bogglingly complex as King unpicks the strands of label, shop and distribution network and the schisms between its bosses. The result is one of the more reliable accounts of the era, if not always the most glitzy or thrilling. It certainly shatters the "us versus them" illusion of the indie scene as one big happy family, as grievances fester, drug-assisted mistakes pile up and disillusionment takes its toll. The spotlight falls on the unshakeable self-belief of Creation's Alan McGee, the musical discernment of 4AD's Ivo Watts-Russell, and the high-minded DIY ethics of Rough Trade's Geoff Travis. Both an inspiration and a cautionary tale.