Radio Gonzo

Date Published: 4th March 2016 I loved the Sex Pistols. They spoke to me in a way that was mine and mine alone. I was expelled from school a few days before the Silver Jubilee, and God Save the Queen summed up everything that I felt, and everything I wanted to say but was too much of a teenage boy to be able to. I was living in Bracknell, Berkshire at the beginning of 1978, and I was walking to work in the ice and snow of a Berkshire winter when I heard that the band had split. "That makes sense" I thought to myself. The career arc of the band had a glorious symmetry about it, and like thousands of others I waited to see what they were going to do next. What Johnny Rotten did next was to stop being Johnny Rotten, and do something completely different. The day that the first single by his new band Public Image Limited came out, I was there in Braddicks record shop (where the funeral parlour is now) at the end of Mill Street in Bideford. I took it home and put it on my little battery operated record player.