Iconic punk band The Sex Pistols (pictured in 1978) are making waves again on the charts in 2022. Photo: Redferns.

It’s 1977. You’re 18 years old. The nation is going mad celebrating the Queen’s 25 years on the throne. Everything is silver and golden. The monarch is travelling the length and breadth of her dominion on the sceptred isles and overseas. The bunting and the devotion are the colours of the day. God Save the Queen indeed.

Well, for most.

A strain of the population was pulling away from the national DNA. It was an angry pulse. The owners of this throbbing heart were not alone. They were, in fact, an army. They were angry at lots of things, and they couldn’t live in the house that had been built for them. They tore it down and, for a little while, succeeded. They rejected the clothes, the fashions, the norms, the music surrounding them.

They were outcasts. They were punks.

Bob Dylan once sang that time is a jet plane, it moves too fast. Here’s another thing that time is: a punk song, fast, thrashing everything out of its way, to its hard-edged final crash.

There’s no pause, no change of beat to catch the breath or to angle the ears and the heart in another direction. A missile launch. You don’t expect it to come back in the form that it left.

And if you were 18 in 1977, in England, ‘God Save the Queen‘ meant something – something different.

It meant you were marching, dancing, singing, roaring to a different beat. Enter the Sex Pistols.

The filth and the fury, as the “Daily Mirror” raged on its front page after the band’s appearance on live TV late in 1976 with host Bill Grundy. Profanities abounded. Uproar was let loose upon the genteel streets of middle England. An extract:

Grundy: Well, keep going, chief, keep going. Go on, you’ve got another five seconds. Say something outrageous.

Steve Jones: You dirty bastard!

Grundy: Go on, again.

Jones: You dirty f—er!

Grundy: What a clever boy!

Jones: What a f—ing rotter.

Grundy: Well, that’s it for tonight.

‘Anarchy in the UK’, their first single, seemed somewhat apt. Bizarrely, the Pistols only appeared because the band originally slotted in had to pull out because their lead singer needed emergency dental work. That singer was Freddie Mercury and the band, Queen.

A few months later, now known throughout the land, the Pistols, recorded ‘God Save the Queen’. It was released in May, right in the middle of the silver jubilee.

“God save the Queen/the fascist regime/made you a moron/a potential H-bomb.”

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The BBC, quite naturally, banned the song from its playlist. And quite naturally from that it roared up the charts, only to be stymied by Rod Stewart’s ‘I Don’t Want to Talk About It’, though rumours persist that there was skulduggery afoot in the tallying of sales to stymie the Pistols reaching top spot.

Ah, but how times have changed (sorry that punk Dylan again). Now the Queen is celebrating her platinum jubilee and what has rocketed up the charts again? The Pistols’ God Save the Queen, No.1 on the streaming charts and climbing the singles charts.

It also coincides with the release of the mini-series “Pistol”, directed by Danny Boyle on the life and times of the band.

And to prove that rage can take many forms, John Lydon has been in a court battle with his ex-bandmates Jones and Paul Cook over the use of the Pistols songs in the “Pistol” series.

Lydon lost, in essence because the band had once agreed to abide by that essence of democracy: majority rules.

Time being a jet plane, it can also transport past attitudes to more moderate climes. Lydon, for instance, dare it be said, seems to have mellowed. Speaking to commentator Piers Morgan recently, he said: “I’ve got to tell the world this. Everyone presumes that I’m against the royal family as human beings, I’m not.

“I’m actually really, really proud of the Queen for surviving and doing so well.

“I applaud her for that and that’s a fantastic achievement. I’m not a curmudgeon about that.”

And then this: “I just think that if I’m paying my tax money to support this system, I should have a say so in how it’s spent.”

Revolutionary? Hardly. Which if nothing else shows how hard it is to be in a state of revolutionary fervour all your life.

In a sign that would have brought opprobrium, and more than a pint of lager tossed in your face in the day, Lydon also appeared in “The Times”, of London. Not only the perceived bastion of the establishment, but owned by Rupert Murdoch!

Lydon said he had no animosity towards the royals: “God bless the Queen. She’s put up with a lot.”

He also elaborated on the question of anarchy. It was, it now seems, a “terrible idea. Let’s get that clear. I’m not an anarchist.”

The Sex Pistols barely lasted three years. They released only one album “Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols”. Perhaps that’s all they were ever going to last. Perhaps that’s all they needed as a band.

It is arguable other bands of the time had a greater or more lasting impact. The Clash, for instance, or Gang of Four in England, The Ramones in the US, or in Australia, The Saints.

But to be raised from the dead for a jubilee? That takes class.

Punk is dead. Long live punk.