Pop music
God Save the Queen
Marcus Berkmann
nation rejoices. Flags and bunting bedeck every building. A spontaneous outbreak of street parties brings traffic to a halt. Cakes are baked, Union Jacks are waved and small children are climbing through tiny open windows to burgle your house. And all this to celebrate one of the more momentous anniversaries in recent British history. Is it really 25 years since the Sex Pistols released 'God Save The Queen'? By golly, it is.
And who is this but John Lydon himself, a crumbling relic of a man, with an even more crumbling punk hairstyle. Interviewed in all magazines (other than this one), the elderly lead singer of the Sex Pistols remains unrepentant, although I wouldn't be surprised if he has had his teeth done. I used to know a bloke whom everyone called the world's oldest punk',
but Lydon is at least ten years older than he ever was, and probably ever will be. If it all seems such a long time ago, that's because it is. Historians generally consider the birth of punk to have been in 1976, and roughly four million people claim they were there at the Roxy when it all began. The truth is that no one took the blindest bit of notice of any of it until the famed Bill Grundy interview on Thames TV's Today programme, which ended poor old Grundy's career. This I actually did see, being the sort of sad adolescent who was always more likely to be watching early evening local news programmes than hanging around hip clubs with the art-school crowd. Tapes of the interview now show portly, possibly blotto Grundy attempting to provoke four ugly and misshapen youths to swear and be outrageous, so it wasn't exactly a huge effort for them to do so. But my word, did it get something going. Suddenly it was no longer acceptable to bring the new Yes album into school, with its five long tracks, triple-gatefold sleeve and useless Hipgnosis sleeve design. Ideally, you had the Damned's first album; if not that, the Stranglers', and you knew that the Clash's was imminent. (I still have the Stranglers' Rattus Norvegicus but most of the others are long gone. And the Yes album with the triple-gatefold sleeve I played only the other day.)
Not that I was a punk. Absolutely not. Too old at 16. Too much of a swot. Not part of the blank generation. Instead, part of the generation that was trying to pass A levels and the Oxford entrance exam. But a few months later, as his own adolescence kicked in, my younger brother embraced punk with the zeal of a Moonie. He had all the records. He bought a bass guitar which he played very badly. He wore all the clothes and, most catastrophically of all, he dyed his hair pink. Every so often you see some sad Swedish tourist or halfwit from Abergavenny strolling the streets of London in full retro-punk clobber, complete with safety pins and dayglo socks — and you remember just what it felt like to be a teenager. And part of it, a great part of it, is listening to this terrible loud nihilistic music. Nothing really changes: grunge was the same thing, so was hip-hop, so is what they call 'nu metal' now. Needless to say, I prefer the terrible, loud, nihilistic music of my own teenage years, but doesn't everybody?
'God Save The Queen' wasn't the best punk single, but it was certainly the cheekiest and the best timed. Everyone knew that it had sold enough copies to reach Number 1. The NME chart certainly said it had, but the BBC chart, then as now the definitive arbiter of these things, placed the single only at Number 2, preferring the mellifluous tones of Rod Stewart's 'I Don't Want To Talk About It/The First Cut Is The Deepest' — oddly enough, his last presentable single, but at the time a standard bearer for all the old, had pre-punk ways. Rod survived; virtually everything survived, because punk was superseded surprisingly quickly. Within five years Elvis Costello would be releasing a country album, and five years after that, people like me were already writing their 'Ten Years Since Punk' pieces. The nostalgia express hasn't stopped since.
Twenty-five years, then, which means only 25 years to go until punk's golden jubilee. A septuagenarian Lydon alongside toothless Joe Strummer telling us all that the young ones today don't know they're born? Don't rule it out.
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