The first thing Keith noticed while driving up the school driveway was the neatly painted twelve-inch-high picket fence separating the asphalt from the grass. His heart sank - this visit was going to be a disaster.

His car was tiny, electric, and was covered in an advertising wrap: a large vinyl graphic applied over the vehicle’s original paintwork. This transformed it into a mobile billboard advert for his place of work.

The design on the wrap was of a graffiti-covered train. The graffiti read:

“Punk Lives! Come to the Manchester Museum of Punk

Mon-Sun (9.30-4 pm). Last admissions at 3 pm.

Telephone bookings are required.”

The design was meant to be impactful, but kids are not easily stirred. On their break in the playground, some pupils looked up from their phones for maybe ten seconds before returning to their online chats with someone who was probably within touching distance.

Keith remembered back to when he was a kid at this same school. Friendless, bored rigid and bullied, he hadn’t enjoyed his time there. Forty years later, it took a lot of persuading for him to come back, but the school had been very persuasive.

The 1970s were a mandatory part of the exam board’s history curriculum that year, and the punks were a big part of any montage ever made of the 1970s in Britain. The school felt lucky to have an alumnus who was a real punk back in the day, and who could come in to talk about his experiences.

When Keith himself had been at this school in the 1970s, they had brought some old geezers into his history class to talk about their experiences shooting at Germans in Normandy. He found it sobering to think that it was now his turn to be the old geezer. Was punk as distant a historical event for these kids as World War II had been for him?

Keith parked in the teachers’ car park and walked towards the school reception. He was in his mid-fifties, with hair combed over a bald patch; a classic hairstyle for gentlemen of Keith’s vintage, but unusually, Keith had dyed his combover red, white, and blue.

He wore the same leather jacket and bondage trousers he had worn in the 1970s. The jacket was shabby and held together by more safety pins than stitching. You could just about see something faded written on the back. It had once read ‘Tosser!’. Spam Head, the drummer of the Mersey Mumps, had sprayed it in silver paint at Keith’s request. This had happened in the queue at Rafters nightclub shortly before Spam’s tragic ferry mishap.

Keith was met by Prisha, the Head of History, at the school reception. She brought him through to the canteen, where they were still clearing away after lunch. There was a small, raised stage at the far end, and some cheap and nasty plastic chairs were arranged in rows facing it. A projector, a screen and an amplifier had been provided for him.

Keith sniffed the air. It didn’t smell like the school canteen he remembered. The old canteen had smelled of indeterminate fish and boiled cabbage. This canteen smelled of kale and couscous.

“You’re going to have three classes in one - good luck with that. Could you please keep the noise down as much as possible and, please, no swearing.”

Keith smiled. “Sure thing, Prisha.”

The girls and boys started filing into the canteen. They were well-dressed in their uniforms and were chatting using their ‘indoor voices’. The age range was thirteen to sixteen, and there were very few non-white kids. The school was well-located in a wealthy suburb, which had been relatively well-to-do when he had gone to school there, but it had become even leafier and yet more prosperous since then. These boys and girls were exclusively the children of chartered surveyors and lawyers and doctors. Oh boy, why had he agreed to do this?

He plugged in his bass guitar and set up his PowerPoint presentation, and when he was ready to start, he played a spiky version of the beginning of the National Anthem. This was partly a soundcheck and partly to signal that he was good to go. The kids laughed, and Prisha took the cue and introduced him.

“Good afternoon, everyone. We’re fortunate today to have a genuine piece of history with us. Doctor Keith Connery is the curator of the Manchester Punk Museum, which we will visit next week. In the 1970s, he was part of the original Manchester punk scene. Doctor Connery was one of the very few people to attend the legendary first concerts of the Sex Pistols in Manchester. He went on to create the influential fanzine ‘Sometime and Maybe’ before having a distinguished academic career studying punk music and culture.

“You’re going to be able to ask Keith all the questions you have. But let me start: Keith, what exactly is punk?”

Keith grimaced.

“Thanks for that, Prisha. It sounds like it should be an easy warm-up question, but I’ve spent most of my academic career looking for a satisfactory answer to that very question.

“Let’s start by defining punk music. Punk is angry, simple, energetic music from the 1970s with lyrics designed to get a reaction from parents and people in authority in general. Punk put a high value on authentic and raw live performances without getting too fancy. Because of the anger and the energy, almost all punk music is played extremely fast.

“But punk is about more than just punk music; otherwise, you wouldn’t have it on your exam curriculum forty years later, and I wouldn’t have a museum to curate. Sure, the music was the initial impetus and the guiding light, but punk was also about fashion and art and expressing yourself and annoying the people in authority in whatever medium you could find.

“The punk fans were very different from the punk bands. In this montage, you can see pictures of people in Mohican haircuts, with safety pins and zips everywhere. You’re likely looking at punk fans rather than punk performers here - very few punk performers dressed in that stereotypical punk style. For the musicians, it was all about the music. I heard many say it made them sick that people used their music to sell clothes. Few punk musicians could have afforded Vivienne Westwood punk clothing, and fewer of those cared enough about clothes to shell out that kind of money.

“Here, for example, is a picture of the Sex Pistols at their iconic 1976 concert in Manchester. Can you see how the band is dressed? The lead singer looks like he got that lemon cardigan from a charity shop. In fact, it looks like he stole it from the old lady behind the till at a charity shop. I’m not sure if the cigarette burns in it are a statement, or maybe he just fell asleep smoking one night.”

He turned to Prisha. “Does that answer your question?”

She nodded, wishing that he’d say something that the kids could use to answer an exam question. She invited someone else to ask a question.

 “What’s a fanzine?”

“It’s like a blog, except we didn’t have the internet in the 1970s, so we had to type what we wanted to say on a typewriter and then photocopy it and hand it around at gigs.”

“What were punks like?”

“They were different – very different. No two punks were the same. Punk was about individuality. There wasn’t one type – some were violent, some were artistic. One detail that doesn’t get mentioned is the smell. Many punks didn’t wash, some took a lot of drugs, and there wasn’t a lot of toothbrushing going on. So, most punks smelled terrible. Including me, but I did eventually clean up my act.”

“What band did you play in?”

“I didn’t play in any band. I was a fan, I edited fanzines, and I studied the music. But I never got around to playing in a band.”

“What’s your guitar for then?”

“Just for fun. I use it in my lectures, and I like to play along with records at home. I know, pretty sad, right?”

“What happened to punk?”

“There are several answers to that question. One explanation is that it died when the Sex Pistols broke up. Another is that punks grew up, learned more than three chords, and went on to create more sophisticated music. Also, the punk fans grew up, had kids, and got jobs.

“I prefer to say that punk never died because its influence is still everywhere. Here is a photo of an exhibit in the museum which I call ‘The Punk Family Tree’. It shows the links of influence extending back to punk, especially The Sex Pistols. How can punk be dead when the music is still being played and interpreted by new generations in new ways?

“Let’s play a game – give me a successful music act from today, and I’ll link it back to punk. Go!”

“Ed Sheeran.”

“Good one – not obvious. But he was influenced by Taylor Swift, who was influenced by Madonna, who was influenced by Debbie Harry of Blondie, who was … punk.

Alternatively, Ed Sheeran learned to control his stutter by rapping along to Eminem records. Eminem was influenced by the Beastie Boys, who started out as a hardcore punk band. Give me another one?”

“Adele.”

“You’re making me sweat here. I could be lazy and go back through Madonna being an influence and then back to Debbie Harry, but Adele to Kanye West to Joy Division to the Sex Pistols is a more interesting chain. Give me a hard one.”

“Justin Bieber.’

“Easy – Justin Bieber to Justin Timberlake to David Byrne of Talking Heads, the well-known punk band.”

“Maroon 5”

“Loved Oasis who loved the Sex Pistols.”

“Little Mix”

(laughter)

“Yes, you don’t particularly think of a plastic pop band as having influences, but they were influenced by all the great R&B female performers of the past. I could go the Taylor Swift-Madonna route or the Rihanna-Madonna route back to punk.

“So, you see the point of this game. Musicians are inspired by musicians who are inspired by musicians and so on, back to the first caveman who bashed two rocks together. In these chains of influences, some names keep coming up time and time again. Madonna would be one example. She influenced millions of people, thousands of whom made music. In previous years there was Elvis and the Beatles.

I study punk, and the most influential band of the punk era was The Sex Pistols. The interesting thing about their influence is that most of it is down to one single concert—Manchester, Lesser Free Trade Hall – fourth of June 1976. Only forty or so attendees, but a crazy percentage of those forty were inspired to form a band or otherwise devote their lives to this new music, punk.

“The Lesser Free Trade Hall in central Manchester was until recently part of a luxury hotel, but now it has been renovated as a concert venue, and it also houses the Manchester Museum of Punk, which you will be visiting next week. So maybe I need to shut up and leave something to say when you come. I do have time for a couple more questions, though.”

“What’s your favourite punk song?”

“The Sex Pistols did a song called ‘Pretty Vacant’. It has the best guitar intro ever and extra snarly lyrics from Johnny Rotten. I first heard it in 1976, and I loved it. They released it as a single in 1977, and they went on ‘Top of the Pops’ to play it.

“Now, you might think it was a bit of a sell-out, them going on such a mainstream show, but it was one of my all-time favourite punk happenings.

“You see, the song contained the word ‘vacant’ ten times, and every time, Johnny Rotten failed to pronounce it ‘vay-cant’. Instead, he pronounced it ‘vay-qunt’. So just after 7 pm on a Thursday, the TV viewers of Great Britain were treated to the following.”

Keith played the chorus on his guitar.

“We’re so pretty, oh so pretty. We’re vay …”

He stopped and waited until some braver or naughtier kids sang the worst swear word in the English language.

Everyone laughed, and Keith repeated the line, again pausing after ‘vay’. This time he didn’t have to wait long because all the children loudly and immediately sang that word.

Prisha pulled the plug on Keith’s amplifier.

“I’m sorry, children – that’s all we have time for today.”

There was some dissent, but the kids were reluctantly cleared out of the canteen and went back to class, some of them singing the uncensored version of the lyrics as they went. A few asked Keith for his autograph, but Prisha shooed them away.

When they were alone together, Prisha turned to Keith, her face full of anger.

“Why did you have to do that?”

“They asked me a question, and I answered it honestly and fully.”

“I told you, no swearing.”

“I didn’t swear – your kids did the swearing. I blame the teachers.”

“You’re impossible.”

“You’re not the first to say so. See you next week - the kids are going to love the museum tour.”

Prisha played with the idea of cancelling the whole trip on the spot, but instead, she just stormed off. The admin involved in a cancellation would have been excruciating.

Keith packed his guitar and accessories into his gig bag and walked back out to his car. When he stepped outside, some of the kids were leaning out of a second-floor window, cheering him.

He drove back down the driveway with a happy feeling in his heart because he had made these kids feel something and because he had annoyed someone in authority.

Halfway to the exit, Keith steered the car off the driveway and onto the grass and into the low, neat, white picket fence. He drove along the length of it for a while, scattering white pickets and crossbeams left and right. He swerved back onto the asphalt just before the end.

Keith looked in his rear-view mirror at the destruction he had caused and saw that it was good.

“Anarchy in the UK!” he whooped as he made a right turn out of the school, with absolutely no care or attention.