Safety pins and pension plans

PROFILE THE SEX PISTOLSTHERE'S A PATHETIC poignancy to a Sex Pistols show these days: look around and all you will see is a bunch of early fiftysomethings wondering if their bad backs will allow for a spot of light pogo-ing. These veterans of the "punk wars" who once shouted "Anarchy!" and "Destroy!" at anything that moved in the mid-to-late 1970s are now pot-bellied careerist drones on a desperate "remembrance of things past" night out.

Loaded up on cheap beer and singing tunelessly along, it's a rare night off from mortgage/pension plan worries for a group of people who once honestly believed that a few guitar chords could presage social revolution. And the audience aren't that much different.

This wasn't supposed to happen. The musical movement known as punk, which spread like a virus through the culture from 1977 onwards and had in its vanguard The Sex Pistols, always had a built-in expiry date. Punk had a right here/right now propulsion which mocked notions of legacy and longevity. In their brief existence, The Sex Pistols only ever released one album and only ever intended to be a metaphorical bout of electro-convulsive therapy for a music world that had become dull and calcified.

The idea of them waddling back onto the stage, 30 years after punk was officially declared dead, as a Jurys Cabaret version of themselves seems like a hypocritical betrayal of everything they claim to represent. A music promoter who booked the band to play a European show a few months ago described their set as "saddening", adding: "The Sex Pistols left their swimming pools at home only to scoop up some money here. There's nothing more to them than that these days."

The Pistols are one of the headliners at the Electric Picnic festival which takes place next weekend in Stradbally, Co Laois. As headliners, they're sandwiched in between the ethereal orchestral-pop of Sigur Rós and the art-noise of My Bloody Valentine. Thousands will flock to the festival's main stage on Saturday night to see John Lydon, Steve Cook, Paul Jones and Glen Matlock play musically rudimentary songs with lyrics that detail council estate ennui about pre-Thatcherite Britain.

A gross anachronism? Certainly. But, and there's always a but with the Pistols, of the festival's three headliners, they are, in 2008, still the most talked about and most relevant band at the festival. Consider just two small details: as the Batman sequel The Dark Knight still plays to packed cinemas and superlative reviews, the director Christopher Nolan has revealed that he modelled the character of The Joker on John Lydon. And in a recent survey of the most requested TV archive clips in Britain, at number one was the footage of The Sex Pistols swearing on live TV in 1976.

ALMOST EVERY BAND that straps on a guitar at this year's Electric Picnic has in some way been influenced or inspired by The Sex Pistols, if not musically then by how they succeeded in remoulding ideas of popular culture.

But don't confuse the appearance of a reformed Sex Pistols with an ironic commentary on the ubiquity of the musical revival act. This is, after all, a band who named their first reunion tour, in 1996, the "Filthy Lucre Tour".

They have no new material to tout, they'll just be bashing out the hits from the 1970s in a retro-punk style. The thousands who watch them will be there as an act of witness. The Pistols remain the most totemic band of their generation.

When they first formed in London in 1975, popular music had long gone from something subversive and edgy (Elvis and his pelvis on the Ed Sullivan show, all those "Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone?" headlines) to being a dismally neutered corporate entity. In 1975, the oil price-based world recession was about to kick in, and, in the UK, 18 years of Tory rule was just a grocer's daughter away.

Watching a man in a flowing purple cloak behind a gigantic bank of synthesizers playing songs based on the Arthurian legend was never going to appeal to the first generation London-Irish teenager John Lydon. As bereft of musical ability as his three bandmates, the band did have as manager Malcolm McLaren - a sort of poor man's Max Clifford who applied the shock-art tactics of Situationism to his young charges.

"No Beatles, No Stones in 1977" read the T-shirt John Lydon used to sport as he made a general nuisance of himself on London's King Road (the epicentre of the punk movement). Prodded by McLaren, the highly intelligent, articulate and fiercely independent-minded Lydon was reluctantly pushed forward as the figurehead of this new musical movement.

Punk was to be about returning music to its most basic principles - a famous article in a punk fanzine of the time showed three basic guitar chords over the exhortation "Now go and form a band" - and tabloid infamy was to be its propaganda sheet.

Lydon and the Pistols never disappointed in the outrage stakes - they horrified a nation when they swore on live television during an interview with Bill Grundy (at 5.30pm!); when they were signed to record labels, shareholders would protest and they would be dropped; their shows were routinely cancelled by local councils fearful for the moral health of local residents; they released an anti-monarchist tirade called God Save The Queen in Britain's Jubilee year and after a drunken incident at an airport, the next day's newspaper report read: "The Sex Pistols were doing something so disgusting that an eyewitness could not repeat it for publication". The generation gap had returned to music.

Although their actual musical output was derisory in comparison to their media presence, the songs still resonate and, as one demographic from the 1970s will always view the intro to Abba's Dancing Queen as the defining 10-second musical moment of the decade, another will (rightly) counter that the honour belongs to the intro to the Pistols' Pretty Vacant. It remains one of the most stirring passages of popular music you are ever likely to hear.

The band spectacularly imploded on a US tour (where McLaren had deliberately booked them into "redneck" venues to generate even more controversy) and shortly afterwards their replacement bass player, Sid Vicious, stabbed his girlfriend to death in a New York hotel while strung out on heroin - and died himself from an overdose before he could stand trial.

THE MOST FREQUENT misunderstanding about the band and the punk movement in general is that it only ever amounted to some great records and the brief fashionability of mohican haircuts, safety pins and bondage trousers. What Lydon and his cohorts achieved was nothing less than the resetting of the controls of popular culture. Musically, punk liberated and democratised - women were treated as music equals and not "chicks" and the endemic racism of the time was met head on by the punk-inspired Rock Against Racism movement.

But unlike previous music sub-cultures such as mods and rockers, punk went above and beyond the call of duty and impinged on different art forms. Its narky and iconoclastic influence spilled over into the worlds of drama, cinema, literature, fashion and the visual arts. Mark Ravenhill, Quentin Tarantino, Irvine Welsh, Alexander McQueen and Damien Hirst/Tracey Emin have all acknowledged their debt to the energy and irreverence of punk and The Sex Pistols.

And that is why punk still matters and the Pistols (even in their dotage) matter too. In a celebrity-infested, media-saturated world of nugatory nuisances as belched up by Pop Idol/ Big Brother or any other hysterically paced and cheatingly contrived TV reality show where the concepts of "human interest" and "lifestyle" have been stretched and pulled into a new pruriently perverted shape, punk remains a corrective antidote.

The Sex Pistols today may be just a cartoon tribute band to themselves but they were once, with due deference to The Beatles, four young men who shook the world. For the better.

CV THE SEX PISTOLS

The Filth:Never mind the bollocks above, Electric Picnic please welcome The Sex Pistols. They may have turned down an induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with "an obscene gesture" but if there's a big open field anywhere near them, they'll play it. Steel yourselves, Co Laois.

The Fury:The shouting, swearing, vomiting, urinating, drunken outrage that is The Sex Pistols will be corrupting and debasing with their musical filth at the Electric Picnic. Or they might have been 30 years ago. Their rider from a show last month politely requests that they have bone china to eat off and their own private and supervised toilet.

No Fortune:Swimming pools! The band are broke. They made next to nothing from The Sex Pistols (thanks to a series of dodgy deals) and John Lydon was once reduced to appearing on I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here! Both Lydon and Steve Jones live in the US these days, where they work as DJs. Paul Cook and Glen Matlock are jobbing musicians. They now chase the retro-punk dollar.

No Future:Hilariously, for a group who once scorned "dinosaur rock bands", a team of palaeontologists have named a series of fossils in honour of the band: Arcticalymene rotteni, A. jonesi, A. cooki, A. matlocki and A.viciousi. And now that the band are more of an institution than anything else, expect John Lydon at Buckingham Palace any day now for his knighthood for services to the punk rock movement. Or maybe not.