when i say punk f---ed everything.

i wasn't referring to the music. everybody who heard the Sex pistols knew they were listening to pretty solid musicianship - those people who could hear past the propaganda expectations of rubbish.

it was another great flowering of what is probably the nearest thing England has to folk music. People singing about their lives. There were bands like The Redskins, The Vibrators, TRB even, X Ray Spex - and Crass meant a lot to a lot of people.

However Punk brought a new sort of entrepreneurial reptile to the music business. those magazine columnists whose work you had loved by that time for ten years or so( and you knew all their limitations and strengths) Bob Dawbarn , Allan Jones, Max Jones, Colin Irwin, karl Dallas....they all almost totally disappeared and were replaced by reviewers whose favour was definitely up for sale, nothing to say about the music, everything about the style, the dress, physical appearance... and boy did they fuck up some careers in music.

The worst sin of all was to have a really bloody good record out that you could perform to an adoring audience none of whom were trying to look as though they had been dressed by Vivienne westwood.

The music they championed always looked good and sounded crap. the charts HAD to be fixed. really heart breaking was your musician friends stories of how their "break" that they had worked years for, had been screwed up by the whole corrupt stinking business. Record shops told they couldn't have ONE copy of their record unless the shop agreed to take 10 or 25 of the latest pile of pooh.

It was in 83 I had my one hit in Germany. the German record company said , oh England - forget it, the record business there is just for gangsters - you'd never get paid from an English company anyway.
Check out the movie Breaking Glass - captures the period very well and the personalities very well indeed. even has oscar winner Jim broadbent in a walk on part