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‘I still can't sing,’ [John] Lydon says with evident pride. ‘My voice is an instrument of torture and that's good enough for me. I'm an expressionist.’ A Situationist? ‘Ooh, no, no, certainly not that. No poncey Left Bank politics from Paris for me.’

They are not very ideologically sound, the Quo, are they, readers? Their attitude to women (particularly ex-wives) is hardly New Man, they use words like ‘poof’ and ‘wop’ with no blink of realisation that it might give offence (though ‘wop’ is all right because Francis Rossi comes from an Italian ice-cream family).

Roger Waters is thought, by many, to be the gloomiest man in rock. The Wall was gloomy and his solo LPs, The Pros and Cons of Hitchhiking (1984) and Radio K.A.O.S. (1987), were gloomy, and his latest work, Amused to Death, is frightfully gloomy. Waters’ voice drones along to warn us that: a) there’s a squaggly Jeff Beck guitar solo coming up any minute; b) everything is horrible, especially television, war, the entire universe and Andrew Lloyd Webber.

Smash Hits would never be the functionary of '80s pop's massive and shiny PR machine. Why? Because of Tom Hibbert. (First question in Foreigner interview, January 1985: ‘Are you the most boring group in the world?’)

David Crosby had become a major hate figure since his bust-up with [Roger] McGuinn and since he had severely marred the otherwise fabulous Younger Than Yesterday album with his pompous song ‘Mind Gardens’, where the fat one had quoted Shakespeare and sounded very silly indeed.