Anarchy in the EU

It is 40 years since the band in which Paul Cook banged the drums, the Sex Pistols, detonated a bomb called punk in post-war Britain. The shards are still visible. ‘We didn’t have a manifesto, but we wanted to shake things up,’ he says. ‘We didn’t know how much we would shake things up. Music, art, design, films, books. Punk is part of our social and cultural history.’

We’ve come a long way from 1976, when Johnny Rotten and ‘Anarchy in the UK’ put the pestilential Pistols on the front pages, and a prime-time television exchange with Bill Grundy, the celebrated ‘fucking rotter’ interview, kept them there. The band were banned from concert venues, denounced in every bully pulpit, damned as ‘illiterate sub-humans’. The work of the devil, no less.

The teenage Cook was an apprentice electrician at the Stag brewery in Mortlake, trying to find his path to freedom. ‘Get a trade, that’s what they used to say.