Viv Albertine’s CLOTHES CLOTHES CLOTHES MUSIC ­MUSIC MUSIC BOYS BOYS BOYS (Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, $27.99) was written “with” nobody at all — which in this context, in this genre, counts almost as a political act. Albertine played guitar for the Slits, the fearless all-­female unit that (among other things) opened for the Clash on the 1977 “White Riot” tour. She writes beautifully, in a dreamy, self-interrogating, pre-Internet continuous present, a kind of imagistic drift in which the pale antiheroes of London punk rock come and go like skinny-legged ­poems. On Sid Vicious: “Everything he does he takes as far as he can. He detaches himself from fear, remorse, caring about his safety or his looks and just becomes a vessel for other people’s fantasies about him, like Paul Newman in ‘Cool Hand Luke.’ ” The young punks having succeeded (amazingly) in making sex uncool, Albertine and Vicious lie back to back in bed, in chaste paranoia. “As the sun comes up, we edge closer and closer to each other in tiny little movements, hoping not to be detected. By the morning we’re pressed hard against each other, back to back, stuck together with sweat, making as much physical contact as possible.”

The guitar druid Keith Levene, soon to invent a new guitar language with Public Image Ltd., is Albertine’s musical mentor, rallying her from her “Guitar Depressions” (“He says he has them all the time, it happens when you stall in your learning”) and applauding the untutored noises she is beginning to make — “humming, buzzing and fizzing like a wasp trapped in a jam jar.” Johnny Thunders is coming over from New York, news of which is “like hearing Dracula is on his way to our shores in the hold of a ship.” He does not disappoint: “He acts like he can barely stand up but his fingers glide up and down the guitar neck as easily as if he’s running them through his hair.” Albertine and Thunders kiss, and he breaks off to shout to a bandmate, “I felt something!” But there can be no love. “He’s got no room for love, his heart is full of heroin.”

Image Billy Idol in Amsterdam, 2014. Credit... Paul Bergen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

And then there are the punk rock women: the ­designer Vivienne Westwood; Chrissie Hynde, later of the Pretenders; hanging out at the attitudinal test tube that was the Sex clothing store. “Once when Vivienne asked Chrissie a question, Chrissie replied, ‘Oh, I just go with the flow.’ Vivienne thought that was unacceptable and wouldn’t speak to her again for a year.” And the volcanic Ari Up, dreads piled high, who became frontwoman of the Slits when she was 14 years old: “wonderful and terrible in equal measure.” Growing up in the band, Ari is stabbed in two separate incidents and — like the rest of the women — regularly “attacked, spat at, sworn at and laughed at.” Not quite like being in Aerosmith, then.

Billy Idol also wrote his book by himself. “I contemplated deep, caliginous, silent thoughts that hinted of a darker America.” Caliginous, eh? (Adj., misty; dim; obscure; dark.) That’s what I’m talking about. DANCING WITH MYSELF (Touchstone/Simon & Schuster, $28), like the man himself, is all over the place — now chatty (“Zowie was 16, blond and a bit of a scrubber”), now caliginous, now encrusted with sub-Jim Morrisonian lyricism: “Gone was time; gone was ambition. Dance with me, for I have lost the Lioness’s embrace. . . . The wedding feast is here, and I must tell of the forbidden journey where sanity is best lost.” Well, if you must, you must. But I never expected to like Billy Idol, and after reading his book, oddly, I do. He’s a genuine romantic, writing in a kind of overheated journalese about his London punk rock roots — “Our youth, desires and needs and the rush of energy engendered by the joining of like minds crested into a tidal wave of exploding passion” — and then falling head over heels for America: America, with its embraceable lions and its flowering landscapes of electro-rockabilly.

His plentiful atrocities are penitently recounted, as when he wrecks a rented Jet Ski in the Thai resort of Pattaya and then flings $25,000 at the family that owns it. “The Jet Ski was their livelihood. Looking back, I feel just awful about it, but I was really too sick and stoned to fully appreciate the situation at the time.” Of all these memoirs, “Dancing With Myself” was the only one that stimulated my envy — made me want to be Billy Idol for five minutes. “When he looks back,” George Steiner wrote, “the critic sees a eunuch’s shadow.” When Billy looks back, he sees the shadow of a red-eyed priapic cyborg. On a Jet Ski.

Should Neil Young have written his new book, ­SPECIAL DELUXE (Blue Rider, $32), “with” somebody? If you read his last book, “Waging Heavy Peace,” you may well think so. Young writes not prose, exactly, so much as a sort of beatific pre-prose, with no editors for miles. He is a great artist, one of the greatest in rock ‘n’ roll, but his art is ­music. “In this book, I am looking at my relationship with cars over many years.” With a writer (the journalist Scott Young) for a father, he reasons, “I could surely pull something together that would be of interest to somebody and potentially keep me busy for a while, which I really would appreciate.” See what I mean? Guileless as an ear of corn.