It was odd that they were any good, since both McLaren and Rotten were horrid toads, but good they were. They soaked up the moment and spat it back. McLaren, Rotten and the rest of the band seemed to have a keen understanding that they had to be more than a rock band, and something more like a provocation, or a situationist performance, in which the public's reaction was one of the instruments they played. That is perhaps why, looking back, their music on record, is less listenable than, say, the Clash's - being listenable was hardly the point - it was supposed to outrage, and often the context of the outrage rather falls away when you hear the tunes plodding along, after the event.
Rotten was rather smart, and his political outlook was a bit more considered that Jon Savage allowed. He was an anarchist, as he said.
The key to that moment was that it was that young people were not just against capitalism, they were disappointed with the dreary years of Jim Callaghan's Labour government, which summed up the end of the road for statist Labourism, too. That was why Rotten's anarchism was more on the button than the Clash's trotskyist leftism (manager Bernie Taupin tossed public-schoolboy Strummer a handful of Socialist Workers Party pamphlets and told him to put them to music). It was a cultural as much as a political moment - decay and anger all around, with a lot of nihilism.
Rotten, Vicious, Jones and Cook were not the usual artschool posers, either. Rotten grew up on the housing estate built when they knocked down Campbell Bunk (The Worst Street in England' according to Jerry White's book). It is not far from me. Challenged whether the Royal Family was a proper target when the real enemy was capitalism (that was the kind of thing that the New Musical Express asked in those days) Rotten explained that growing up amongst the London Irish, his mother, a cleaner believed in the Queen, and had her picture up on the mantlepiece (as Annie Maguire did) - she was as potent a symbol of the powers that be you could get.
Not a few of the punks were admirers of Mrs Thatcher's promise to bring Labour's regime to its close - the Jam's Paul Weller, for one, who had to make recompense for many years after by organising a particularly soppy Labour Party rock campaign called the Red Wedge; Chelsea's lead singer, too, explained to a confused music journalist that his song 'The Right to Work' was not a protest against unemployment, but against the union closed shop, which he said had cost his dad a job. Chancellor Denis Healey would goad his tory counterparts by saying that they were 'Punk monetarists'.
For the most part, though, the punks were uniformly hostile to the whole of the political establishment, right and left, which they associated with an old order. Most of all, they hated hippies, and all such promises of 'peace, love and understanding'. Violence, was good. And Rotten was intriguingly hostile to sex ('squelching' - he called it), and 'lying' - rather moralistically. Swearing though, was good.