Sometimes I think working in a bookshop is like being inside a large organic jigsaw rumbling with its own idiosyncratic logic and bits of blue sky that just don't seem to want to fit where we think they should go. We have categories but the ideas or the references or the connections overflow these categories and resist any taming.

For instance, let's look at music, film and books. I know that's what we look at all day but when a book as good as In The City: A Celebration of London Music by Paul Du Noyer comes along it deserves to be held up and shaken about a bit to see what pieces fall out.

This month's release of Absolute Beginners on DVD would be easy to file as THAT 1986 musical by Blonde Bowie – all China Girl, linen suits, the 80s years – but after reading Du Noyer’s cartography of London music and influences, the film resonates with much broader meaning.

Absolute Beginners is based on a novel by Colin MacInnes set in London in 1958. Most of MacInnes novels stand as rare chronicles of London underground cultures that met, held hands, tore each other’s clothes off and became the future of rock and roll. Soho espresso bars were the hub for jazz kids, Jamaican migrants, political agitators and the modish dandies who wrote the blueprints for youth culture. That amazing English film director, Julien Temple directed Absolute Beginners, and alongside the leads of Bowie, Patsy Kensit and Eddie O'Connell, there are cameos and bits played by Steven Berkoff, Sade, Robbie Coltrane and Mandy Rice-Davies. Temple gives the film a widescreen technicolour sheen that Baz Luhrmann would envy. The studio tried to sell it as an English Dirty Dancing but that was never going to work. There was too much of the Dennis Potter in it.

Things you can learn from Paul Du Noyer’s book, In The City: A Celebration of London Music:

Mayfair took its name from an annual ceremony, a May Fair, for the “fair maiden lepers” of St James Church, Piccadilly;

The first play Noel Coward wrote opened in London in 1923 and was called The Young Idea, a farce referred to as a 'comedy of youth'. He also wrote a revue called London Calling - The Jam fans and The Clash fans know what that is all about;

The term 'jingoism' derives from a Music Hall song from the Prussian Wars whose chorus went something like "We'll fight them and win by jingo by jingo";

And the evolutionary list looks like this: John Dowland, Gilbert & Sullivan, Music Hall, Noel Coward, Ivor Novello, Max Miller, Tommy Steele, Anthony Newley, David Bowie, Ian Dury, Dizzee Rascal, Lily Allen.

So, from one book the threads spin out across the shop through all the safely 'categorised' shelves - if you like English music or if you like Julien Temple's films or if you like the stories of Hanif Kureishi or Nick Hornby or Alan Sillitoe (Saturday Night, Sunday Morning was turned into a truly compelling film that hasn't dated) then you will be spending some time jigsawing your way around the shelves. I'm just waiting for a re-release of Sammy and Rosie Get Laid. Now that was a great film! But I might just fill in the wait with reading Kureishi's last novel Something to tell You - yes, it has been out for ages but I just haven't got to it yet.