Matthew Worley

Looking back, I think Sex Pistols splitting up when they did was probably a good thing because it meant that them as a focal point of them seeming to embody what punk meant for many people.

So for them to split in January 1978, to all extents and purposes, was a really good thing, I think, because it left them with just these four great singles and an album as a testimony to what they'd done.

It meant they were never going to, at the time, going to go off and become dreadful and release a bad record.

It also created this big vacuum after them where some people had to fill it.

Punk's disaffection before Margaret Thatcher is far more diffuse and in many ways, and again without over-intellectualizing it, quite existential.

It's just the world's rubbish, pop music's rubbish, telly's rubbish, that pub's rubbish, the road looks rubbish, prices are going up, I don't like it, I'm going to do something else.

It's a lot more just general disaffection.

Margaret Thatcher brings real focus.

You've got someone to throw your eggs at.

It can be the most shocking pop band in the end, but ultimately your record company is going to flog a dead horse.

It's going to release some product.

Whether the rock and roll swindle was Malcolm McLaren getting a few quid or actually the swindle was the record industry turning a dangerous cultural form into mere product is open to question.

The pun does very quickly get appropriated and the signifiers of punk get emptied of their meaning and simply positioned as fashion statements or aesthetics or whatever.

and the energy of punk is sometimes retained, but the provocations and willful, unsettling nature of punk is diluted.

We had planted a seed in people to think, right, as soon as people recognize what this is, it has to be something else.

We have to find a way to constantly be inventive.

So you have to dress up and reconfigure yourself monthly in order to stay ahead of the game.

Because if you stand still for a minute, the press will get you and they'll codify you and your cultural brilliance will be transformed into mere commodity.

Punk plays a pretty long game, I think, in terms of the impact that, if we're talking the British context, Sex Pistols have just in terms of inspiring a whole generation of musicians to come up with really constantly evolving and interesting and exciting forms of music and musical presentation.

Punk's most lasting impact on British culture at the time was that it opened up a space for lots of people who previously probably wouldn't have had the opportunity to do creative things and to do creative things in ways that fundamentally changed the culture of Britain and the world.