I was very, very punk at the time

“Knobhead.”

Really?

“Yeah, complete tosser. He was a total nerd. No one at our school liked him. Made some good records, though.”

St. William of York past pupil Noel Martin is recalling the “long-haired, spotty-faced tosser” that used to get shoved around in the playground. Little did they realise that Lydon J. would go on to front those spikiest of punks, the Sex Pistols.

Martin participated in the ‘76 uprising himself as mainman with North London herberts Menace.

“Yeah, we were huge in Finsbury Park”, the 47-year-old laughs. “We built up a good following playing places like the Roxy and the Vortex, but didn’t have a Malcolm McLaren or Bernie Rhodes (Clash manager) to push us up the ladder.”

Svengali-less or not, Menace still managed to cause coronaries with their profanity-packed paen to the Greater London Council. Indeed, I can still recall the bollocking I got when Mr. Clark Snr. heard, “GLC, GLC…, GLC, GLC… You’re full of shit, shit, a-shit, shit, shit, shit” emanating from my room.

“The bloke in charge was a dickie-bowed Tory cunt called Horace Cutler,” Martin reminisces none-too-fondly. “We were working-class lads having a say and a laugh, which to me was the essence of punk. Still is.”

When they weren’t being banned by Horace and his mates – “No sense of humour, them bastards!” – Menace could be found gigging with the likes of Chelsea, London, Sham and The Nipple Erectors.

“The Nips were Shane MacGowan’s band. Only then he was Shane O’Hooligan and wouldn’t have known a folk song if it had bitten him on the ear. Which some bird did at a Pistols show in the 100 Club. When I met him he was a typical London kid who used to walk round with a Union Jack on his coat. Drink-wise, he liked a pint but no more so than the rest of us.”

Menace also got to share a stage with odious neo-Nazis Skrewdriver.

“They were straightforward punks at first, but then Ian (Stewart) started spouting off about the National Front! I didn’t cheer when he died, but I didn’t cry either.”

Disillusioned by the direction punk was taking – “Left or right, we didn’t want to ally ourselves to a cause” – Menace decided in 1978 to call it a day.

“That should have been it, full-stop, but a couple of years ago we got a call from the guy who runs the Holidays In The Sun festival asking if we’d like to do a gig. We were never precious about it in the first place, so we said ‘yes’.”

Call me a cynic, but were the reasons for reforming after two decades mainly fiscal?

“You must be joking. By the time you’ve taken a couple of days off work – I’m a Health & Safety officer nowadays – hired a van and driven half-way across the country, you’re lucky to make twenty quid each. The only reason for doing it is the 45 minutes of pure enjoyment you get on stage.”