John Lydon has taken Big Malcolm to court (surely the Sex Pistols are not the little eunuchs?) and while I write nobody quite knows what the outcome of this shooting match will be except that Virgin Records will emerge smiling.

Unlike many people I don't regard this as the end of the age of innocence. Punks were never innocent. It's easy to envisage the spectre of monolithic record companies laughing, up their capitalistic sleeves, pointing the dollar sign finger at Lydon and McLaren and shrieking: see, so much for punk politics, it always comes down to the bottom line in the end. As if to imagine punks Wanted to stay poor. It's the same belief that keeps the right wingers here (as elsewhere) stuck with the ludicrous thought that the left, in their efforts to remove the power base from a few to the many, would have us all in grey graffiti tower blocks. The idea, my friends, is to do away with them completely.