You’re gonna have to take a little nationalist fervour here. We’ve just spent a week trying to put the Great back into Britain. It only happens every 25 years and a tatty affair it was. It rained all the time and the union jacks were made of dripping plastic. Still and all the Queen did enough to keep the Sex Pistols out of the papers. They had a good week otherwise. Their own jubilee number, “God Save The Queen,” is number two in the chads and their own jubilee party, in a boat on the Thames, was heavied over by the cops. Malcolm McLaren got arrested.

The other thing we got was invaded by New Yorkers. One day in Birmingham we had the Ramones and Talking Heads, a couple of days later we had Television and Blondie. In between I went to see Dolly Parton. Looking back, I’m not at all sure that it wasn’t Dolly Parton who was singing with Blondie. She was certainly the same sort of age as “Debbie Harry” and from the fortieth row back they looked much the same-the blonde sheen, the clumsy schmaltz, the twelve-year-old appeal. I liked both of them in an oldfashioned sort of way but they confirmed that there ain’t much of a place for women in the conventions of punk.