How London punk changed the world

In his new memoir Alastair McKay reflects on the incredible legacy of Seventies music

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AS A teenager in a dying seaside town on the east coast of Scotland, punk rock was like a bat signal from a more exciting world. The centre of that world was London, a city where even the boredom was romantic. Somewhere between London’s Burning in 1977 and London Calling in 1979, The Clash sketched a vision of the capital that was brittle and tedious, febrile and antsy, violent, exotic, alive and tantalisingly out of reach. London’s Burning, the boredom song, was a night-time blur in which flashing headlights dissected the sodium glow of the Westway. London Calling was a post-apocalyptic call to arms, a roll-call of biblical disasters which hummed with possibilities. A new ice age, food shortages, a nuclear error! All of it sounded ideal when compared with the actual tedium of being a teenager revising for exams on the fringes of what would later become known as Scotland’s golf coast.