Sex Pistols: Poison in the Machine analyzes the events surrounding the emergence, the eventful career and the subsquent implosion of the Sex Pistols in a manner that could be said to provide an instance of what cultural historian Robert Darnton labelled 'incident analysis'. The book draws on accounts of events as understood by participants at the time, relating it as a story – as against much post-hoc rationalising or culture industry representations made decades after the fact about what the Pistols 'meant' – to reveal the growing conflict between the artistic ambitions of two principal actors, Malcolm McLaren and John Lydon, who held divergent ideas about who and what the Sex Pistols were.