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The Sex Pistols are now three decades in the past, and if you're under 40, there's a good chance that you won't recognize the names of either Johnny Rotten or John Lydon, who happen to be the same person. Whether the younger generation knows him or not, many of them are walking in his footsteps. The Sex Pistols were a pivotal force in popular culture.

Listen to them now and you'll hear a rawness of sound and a rawness of emotion that a whole range of performers who came after them have tried to imitate. Look at them, and you'll see a street style than became a stage style that became a street style that became a consumer phenomenon. Remember safety pins, tartans, school neckties... pogo-ing?

By the time the Sex Pistols pushed their way into view, there had been a British revolution in pop music every year or two. If those earlier revolutions were about more than music, they were usually about attitude and style, like the Rolling Stones. The Sex Pistols, however, were impossible to understand without understanding where they came from or what they were singing about. Kids of mostly Irish origins from housing estates for working class families (if their parents actually had jobs) were venting emotions about the Royals ("God Save the Queen") and about a society ("I am an Anti-Christ") in which the already-downtrodden working man was being told by a new "free market" government that his real problem was that the government had given him too much money. Bear in mind, these were kids whose parents shoplifted groceries. (Remember, romanticized consumer-safe views of British poverty and abandonment like The Full Monty came more than a decade after labor riots tore the place apart.) The whole country seemed to be on strike - evidenced by mountains of garbage that went uncollected, and the Sex Pistols' practice of wearing "bin liners," black garbage bags, to spoof the extortionately expensive rubber sex-wear peddled at the time by hip haberdasher Malcolm McLaren and the designer Vivienne Westwood. In an street-riot atmosphere like that, why not wear ripped improvised clothes held together with safety pins and spoof upper-class costuming while you spit at the audience, which spits back.

You would think that respectable leaders of society would know better than to denounce the young boys, yet they did. What better fuel for a publicity campaign than official outrage?

For better or worse, the band's bitterness soon became branded, an encouragement for the comfortable pop culture consumers out there to use what came to be called punk as a reason to throw fits about anything that annoyed them. You can't blame the Sex Pistols for that, but punk did turn into the new thing for privileged kids, yet not before the UK was genuinely shocked by the "nasty little bastards" (Sid Vicious) that its children had become. "We declared war on England without meaning to," said their singer, John Lydon. Is he being just a bit coy here? For more on this, consult Lydon's lively 1994 autobiography, Rotten: No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, which could now be on its way to becoming a film.

They're not back - not yet, at least - but AngloMania: Tradition and Transgression in British Fashion, an exhibition at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, has installed examples of punk fashion (enabled if not inspired by the Sex Pistols and others) alongside more established British dress in its English period rooms - a tartan jacket on loan from John Lydon a/k/a Johnny Rotten, Mohawked mannequins sprawled defiantly across a "gentlemen's club," and a bedroom in which a seductress in a spine dress (with a snake-like backbone appended like an odd phallic tail on the outside) moves in with an accomplice for the kill. As often happens, you see more continuity than clash here - the modern clothes are no less British. You also see drama. Each room could be a montage for the stage, or even better, an elaborate production design for a film shot. The ambitious show which puts the "yobs" in the same room as a tiny tuxedoed Duke of Windsor is the work of the Met's costume curator, Andrew Bolton, who happens to be British.

You can see the Sex Pistols on the screen in Julien Temple's perceptive chronicle from 2000 of the band and its times, The Filth and the Fury: A Sex Pistols Movie. (It's a long way from Spinal Tap, and even more distant from the Beatles movies, which were live-action cartoons.)

See this one before watching any of the other tour films or Malcolm McLaren's The Great Rock and Roll Swindle, also directed (far less effectively) by Temple in 1980. Every successful band is ripe for exploitation. For that, we have Sid and Nancy, the triumph of sex and drugs over rock and roll, which wears its age (made in 1986) as awkwardly as any fifty-something paunchy punk.

Lydon, 50, who lives in Los Angeles today, is anything but awkward, a born talker whose opinions haven't softened over the years. I spoke to him in early May when he came for the opening of AngloMania. He was disappointed in coverage of the opening in the New York Times.

Gretchen Mol and John Lydon
at the opening of AngloMania

Tell me about your relations with the press.

In thirty years' experience in the industry, I can truly say the press is just as bad as ever. I don't know why people are paid to write rubbish and to report second-hand gossip. It still, to this day, is one of my bitterest enemies. Maybe the newspapers believe that people have a need to hear others being put down. There's a resentment there. And you'll find that the journalists who wrote this kind of cack weren't actually at the event at all. I certainly wasn't running around the event saying, "Buy my new pants." That was not my intention. But it was my intention to accept an accolade for the Sex Pistols for writing songs that did change social history for us in Britain, which were on some serious subjects, and we were investigated under the death penalty act, the treason act. I think that's kind of relevant. To remove all that, and put it down to someone complaining about his chair and a meat pie is missing the point. It seems to assume, too, the New York Times, that conformity, versus anarchy, was the order of the day.

What was the press like when the Sex Pistols started performing?

Bitter, bitter, bitter, bitter. We were investigated in Parliament. This is ridiculous, under the Traitors Act, and it was always "those foul-mouthed yobs," and that's the thing that's now continued and continued. I thought I'd cleared that up, or quite a bit. But no, it's back again with a vengeance. I don't know who these fashion people are, these journalists, but everybody got a kicking in that [New York Times] article [about the opening of the exhibition]. There's not one saving grace. And in a weird way, you can sort of enjoy it, too - who do those foo-foo people think they are, having fun on the town? [He's referring to the Anglo-mania exhibition and Costume Institute benefit gala at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.] Well, I'll tell you who they are. They raised four-point-odd million, for a good cause. That's good enough, isn't it, and I don't think they need to be slagged off, no matter what they did or wore.

When that investigation happened back in the days of the Sex Pistols, was all of the press against you, or was it just the conservative press?

All of it. All of it. All of it.

So all these people were dancing at the clubs, and they turned around and attacked you?

There were no clubs. We had to create all that ourselves. There was no easy route for us to fall into. It wasn't like it was in America. New York had things like CBGB's, so it was kind of set up. Most of the New York punk bands were following traditional roots. Us, we came from outer space, I suppose, out of nothing, out of council flats, out of the poor end of town. If you're going to make any analogy, rap has been tried, but I don't think that's quite accurate. Rap, to me, was disingenuous about its original roots. It was very much Afrika Bambaataa, but he's kind of been pushed aside for the more gangsterly nonsense, which is all very fashionable, but aggressive and vicious by nature. We've not been that way. All we've done is hit problems on the head and try to solve them.

"God Save the Queen" isn't just a bitter piece of whining, nor in the context of the full Sex Pistols story - "pretty vacant - I'm not pretty, I'm not vacant" - it's about irony. Is this right, is this wrong. A song like "Bodies" - am I pro-abortion, am I not? Well, I'm discussing the bloody issue in the most heartfelt way, and I've always done that. "Death Disco," in Public Image Ltd. What's that about? It's about my mother dying. She asked me to write a song for her, so I did. This is like reality to me. Clear-cut answers like, they're all wrong, they're all right, is not reality. I think the ultimate thing you can achieve in wisdom is to find out that you know nothing. True wisdom. The world is a mad place, and it's full of liars. It's impossible to get over that, but I give it a go. I'm not utopian. It's not that nonsense.

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