Heavier than heaven is pretty good, it's lot better than azzerad's book.

i just read "everything - a book about manic street preachers" for the first time in ten years (?!), gripping story, consistently funny (richey vs douglas coupland at a dinner party is pure gold), and actually quite frightening and sad once Richey starts to really hit the wall. It's about 4 friends from a small town in wales who aim to bring punk rock, politics and glamorous nihilism back to a UK scene dominated by US grunge and Manchester fixated druggy apathy. Things are going well until they slowly begin to realise that one of them actually walks the walk. I think it was out of print for a while back cheap 2nd hand copies seem to have appeared recently, now is the time to snap one up if you're at all curious. I've read an inexcusable number of rock bios and it's definitely one of the very best