Matthew Worley

That's what they did.

I think Reid's the most important in some ways because just that poster for anarchy in the UK, a picture of a Union Jack torn to pieces, held together by safety pins and bull clips.

That's what I mean when I talk about punk reflecting the time because in 1976, if you talk about anarchy in the UK, anarchy could either mean the country falling into total disrepair because there's industrial action and inflation and the IMF bailing it out.

But it's also anarchy is a call to freedom and excitement and that kind of double meaning of, are we on the cusp of something amazing and the world opening up?

Or are we on the cusp of everything collapsing in on us and descending into misery and chaos of a different sort?

So with Jamie Reed's framing of The Pistols, creating that aesthetic around it, it suddenly made a brilliant rock and roll band, an incredible rock and roll band and something more akin to a kind of cultural intervention rather than simply great music to listen to.

The Grundy thing at the end of 1976 is the point in which punk and the Pistols stop being of interest to people who read the music press and become part of the broader cultural fabric.

The Grundy moment serves as the moment when punk moves from being a subterranean, slightly left field and oppositional to something that is infusing the popular culture.

We're so familiar with how punk looks nowadays and spiky hair and whatever, but when you're peeling through the NME in 1976 and every page has got somebody with a beard and someone with long hair and someone wearing a denim suit, flared trousers, posing on stage in a certain way, and then you turn the page and there's suddenly Johnny Rotten, you really get a sense of how different it looked.

I think God Save the Queen is the kind of high point of the pistols being seen as anti-establishment thing where you could put the politics word to them in that it was a willfully provocative, seditious, very insightful critique of where Britain was at in the mid 1970s.

This is a country that its empire is dissolving and disappearing.

It's just entered Europe, so it's into a new phase.

It's come out of the optimistic swinging 60s and all the talk of the white heat of technology, and yet it finds itself in the kind of economic problems in the mid-1970s.

They made for brilliant theater and a brilliant, spectacular response to the mad parade of the Jubilee.

And again, see, crucial to it.

I mean, Rotten's lyrics are fantastic.

But it's also Jamie Reid framing it with that brilliant cover of the Queen muted.

and blinded with blackmail lettering across it, which really just added to the idea that they weren't just antisocial delinquents who swore on television.

They were actually trying to bring the whole thing down.

It's not like punk had an ideological position explicitly, but implicitly the whole thing about punk, about being yourself, doing what you want to do, being who you want to be, having a voice, lent itself to a particular kind of politics.