Well, I think it just goes back to the values that I grew up with in the punk rock world because it was this decentralised world, and so we just made our own way—like we'd be antigovernment or, you know—but we really didn't complain a lot; we were more action-oriented, like, people were publishing fanzines, we were setting up shows, we were getting in vans and touring around, and we were associating with other people, so…y'know, I just like that idea.

Punk's an attitude. Punk's not three-chord rock. If you want to listen to three chord rock, there's southern rock.

Punk was predicated on non-musicianship.

I'm a bit of a punk in my essence and in my core. I'm a bit of an artist and a trickster and, you know, I believe in sort of tearing up the status quo for what people expect you to do.

Punk articulated the vitriolic disapproval by the young of the sneaking complacency in music, art, politics and perhaps most important of all - the environment.

Punk never got into my heart. You hear the anger now in rap, for example, but it’s different and I like that very much. Eminem is one of my favourites.

You know, the actual punk music, I didn't care for at all. I thought it was all rubbish, really. It was the attitude, the way that things were being shaken up, that excited me more. I still liked people who were good, you know? Who could actually play. Even though The Damned were a punk group, they played great. As did Elvis, and as did Ian. They were the ones who interested me. Not some of those daft punkers, especially the ones who had people who were actually pretty good musicians sort of pretending to play badly. That was just so stupid, and missed the point completely, I thought. So it was the people who were true to themselves, I think, that were the exciting ones.

I think our lyrics reflect reality. Maybe not someone else's reality, but definitely ours, you know? I don't write about bullshit and neither does my guitar player, Jerry Cantrell. I have a fascination with how brainwashed people get with religion and how they'll give up their money, their time and their whole life for a cause that they're sure is right, but I'm sure is wrong. I think there's a lot of people who are scared of life and living and they want to make sure they get to Heaven or whatever. I try to stay away from it as much as I can. I was raised in the church until I was 16 and I've disagreed with their beliefs as long as I can remember, so when I had the choice I chose not to believe in anything apart from myself.

If it's some style, especially some shrink-wrapped thing hanging on a wall at Toys 'R' Us, then it won't live, it won't be dynamic … It becomes exactly what the marketing people want — a genre, something to make their job easier. But if it's something like, "Everybody's telling me the wall's over there, but I'm going to push against it and see if it's really there" — to me, that's what punk is. An idealistic attitude.

Punk rock should mean freedom, liking and excepting anything that you like. Playing whatever you want. As sloppy as you want. As long as it's good and it has passion.

Teenage girls
with no life experiences
and boys who
call themselves punk
are on my radio
singing about
how much pain they've endured
and how hard
their lives are

"My interest in comics was scribbled over with a revived, energized passion for clothes, records, and music. I'd wandered in late to the punk party in 1978, when it was already over and the Sex Pistols were history.

I'd kept my distance during the first flush of the new paradigm, when the walls of the sixth-form common room shed their suburban-surreal Roger Dean Yes album covers and grew a fresh new skin of Sex Pistols pictures, Blondie pinups, Buzzcocks collages, Clash radical chic. As a committed outsider, I refused to jump on the bandwagon of this new musical fad,
which I'd written off as some kind of Nazi thing after seeing a photograph of Sid Vicious sporting a swastika armband. I hated the boys who'd cut their long hair and binned their crappy prog albums in an attempt to join in. I hated pretty much everybody without discrimination, in one way or another, and punk rockers were just something else to add to the shit list.

But as we all know, it's zealots who make the best converts. One Thursday night, I was sprawled on the settee with Top of the Pops on the telly when Poly Styrene and her band X-Ray Spex turned up to play their latest single: an exhilarating sherbet storm of raw punk psychedelia entitled "The Day the World Turned Day-Glo" By the time the last incandescent chorus played out, I was a punk. I had always been a punk. I would always be a punk. Punk brought it all together in one place for me: Michael Moorcock's Jerry Cornelius novels were punk. Peter Barnes's The Ruling Class, Dennis Potter, and The Prisoner were punk too. A Clockwork Orange was punk. Lindsay Anderson's If ... was punk. Monty Python was punk. Photographer Bob Carlos Clarke's fetish girls were punk. Comics were punk. Even Richmal Crompton's William books were punk. In fact, as it turned out, pretty much everything I liked was punk.

The world started to make sense for the first time since Mosspark Primary. New and glorious constellations aligned in my inner firmament. I felt born

I had moments of my actions and words not reflecting who it is I am - if that defines a punk, then yes, absolutely.

To me, a punk spirit is just living freely, disregarding societal norms and just being free to be themselves.