Give us the fingers

Far from calming down in their old age, it appears that the quartet have developed a fondness for barroom brawling.

"There was an incident which resulted in us having to postpone some of the dates on our UK tour," admits mainman Jake Burns. "Having played an absolute corker of a gig at the London Forum, we retired to our hotel for what should’ve been a quiet pint. Unfortunately, two very, very drunk blokes sat down besides us and started taking the piss out of everything we were saying. We tried the ‘leave it out, lads’ approach for 10 minutes, but then I snapped and said something along the lines of, ‘Which part of ‘fuck off’ don’t you understand?’

"A melee ensued, in which Bruce (Foxton) slipped and knocked himself out on the marble floor. The poor sod ended up with a black eye and six stitches to the back of his head."

Hard bastard or not, Burns admits to shedding a tear or two when news of Joey Ramone’s death came through.

"Sadly, although we were huge, huge fans, we never got to play with The Ramones," he rues. "In fact, the only time myself and Joey were in the same room together was when we’d come off stage after a shit gig, and I ignored him!"