The punk community was a prominent subculture in his region, and Kanaan was attracted to the politics of its music as well as its anger, its ideas and its melody and harmony.
Kanaan began to distribute fanzines with Political Asylum interviews and works co-published with Housmans people.
Friends from the anti-Poll Tax movement approached him about starting a radical bookstore in Edinburgh, which did not materialize but led Kanaan to expand AK Press into a three-person worker co-op.
[12] Kanaan was involved in bringing the London anarchist bookfair format to San Francisco, which he said was the first of its kind in North America.
PM published materials that AK did not, such as fiction, DVDs, and CDs, mainly with the perspective of sharing their politics with a larger audience than nonfiction could reach alone.