THE summer of '76 was year zero for the British music industry and the youth culture on which it fed. Before then, like so many other teenagers in Glasgow's south side, I was listening to the likes of Yes, Emerson Lake and Palmer, and the Eagles. I had been fascinated with David Bowie since the age of 13 when I saw Aladdin Sane at Green's Playhouse, but it was concept albums and serious-looking guys with 12-stringed guitars that really impressed me and my peers. We appreciated rather than loved the music we listened to, which grew more complex and difficult to hum with each new triple album release. In those days, pop was an uncool, girly word. It was what the Bay City Rollers did, along with the dozens of other bands manufactured to seduce the teenyboppers, or so we liked to think.

Alongside the last gasp efforts of the Rollers and cod-glam rockers like the Sweet, the singles chart was stuffed with over-produced, industrial-scale epics such as Bohemian Rhapsody and John Miles's Music (all together now: "Music was my first love, and it will be my last. The music of the future, the music of the past"). A Brian Eno-less Roxy Music were descending into muzak, and Peter Gabriel had left Genesis, depriving the only prog rock band worth listening to of its creative heart.

David Bowie, having broken up the Spiders From Mars, was in his LA-fixated, anorexic cokehead phase. Like everything he did in the 1970s, his white soul music was infused with the spark of genius, but druggy and decadent, referencing an alien lifestyle far removed from anything a 16year-old Glaswegian might reasonably aspire to. When the Thin White Duke made his infamous Hitler salute at Victoria Station in May 1976, even we die-hard fans knew in our bones that something wasn't quite right. The music industry had become a business populated by bored millionaires who were flirting with fascism or, like Queen, accepting large sums of money to entertain wealthy Afrikaaners at Sun City resorts. It's not that their music didn't have a certain pomp and splendour; just that both it, and the people who created it, were so distant from our everyday reality, the aural analogue of a JRR Tolkien novel.

But within a year everything had changed, and we were engulfed by a cultural revolution. The music industry was turned upside down, its pretensions exposed by the amateurish efforts of a few young men and women who, by accident rather than design, came to be known as punks. The term came by a roundabout route from the US, and few of the original "punks" welcomed the label, but it stuck like the snot they gobbed on each other of an evening down the Roxy. Punk signified a look, and an attitude, and a sound which made London the epicentre of global youth culture.

Some date its birth as a movement to the Sex Pistols performance at Manchester Free Trade Hall in June 1976, before an audience packed with future founding members of Joy Division, The Fall, The Smiths and Simply Red. Others will say that punk's artistic and stylistic zenith came at Islington's Screen On the Green in August that year, when the Pistols, The Clash and Buzzcocks performed before an exclusive crowd of those in the know. For me, it started with The Damned's New Rose, the first punk single. The movement's anthem, Anarchy In The UK, was released in November 1976, followed quickly by the fateful Bill Grundy interview in which Johnny Rotten said "shit" in front of a horrified nation. By the end of 1977, punk had created moral panic and made it onto Top Of The Pops before degenerating into a freakshow for the voyeuristic. The Sex Pistols played their last gigs to drunken rednecks in

the American Midwest. Sid and Nancy died their sordid deaths in the full glare of the media spotlight. From New Rose to Rotten's sneering taunt at the last ever Pistols gig in San Francisco - "Ever get the feeling you've been cheated?" - it had lasted barely 18 months, but it changed the world, even the suburban bit of it which I inhabited.

Like most youth rebellions, punk was an act, albeit a sophisticated one, orchestrated by adults schooled in high fashion, Dada and Situationism, and with a talent for pressing the public's and the media's buttons. Its de facto leaders, Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, were inspired by Andy Warhol's Factory and the band which he adopted, The Velvet Underground. From Warhol and his superstars they learned the art of media spectacle and manipulation. From The Velvets, with their songs of sadomasochism and heroin addiction and their aggressive moodiness towards each other and their audiences, they learned that the more transgressive, shocking and confrontational pop music was allowed to be, the more late-20th century society sat up and took notice. If The Beatles were nice, and the Stones naughty, the Velvets were downright nasty. Add the selfdestructiveness of Iggy Pop, the dress sense

and artifice of Ziggy-era Bowie, and the trash aesthetic of The New York Dolls, and the result was punk.

Initially focused on an elite London fashion and club scene and involving no more than a few hundred disaffected kids, punk rippled outwards on the waves of moral panic which it generated in a country gearing up for the Queen's silver jubilee. It stuck two fingers up at post-war Britain, dissing its monarch at a time when unquestioning deference was still expected. In the mid-1970s the country was still dominated by a suffocating conservatism inherited from the 1950s. Young people were bored, resigned to their fate in Britain's declining, post-imperial torpor. Punk's nihilism was a direct challenge to all of that, restoring a sense of danger and excitement to the business of being young. Just as Marcel Duchamp and the Dadaists had little girls reciting obscene poetry to polite Parisiennes in the 1920s, McLaren and Westwood put explicit gay sex scenes by the artist Tom of Finland on their

T-shirts, and turned S&M rubber gear into must-have fashion items. The punks weren't Nazis, but they delighted in band names like London SS. Siouxsie Sioux stepped out with a red swastika armband, fishnet stockings and black leather, while the Pistols declared that "Belsen was a gas". They weren't political in the conventional senses of left-wing or right-wing but anti-politics, rejecting all authority and all rules except the ones they made up for themselves. What was the most offensive thing you could do in a Britain preparing to celebrate 25 years of Elizabeth II's reign? Call it a fascist regime and go down the King's Road with a symbol of the Third Reich stencilled unapologetically on your leather jacket.

To the established music industry punk said "f*** you, we can do better than that", following up that boast with just enough substance to have EMI, A&M and other major labels queueing up. In true revolutionary style, the punk pioneers seized the means of musical production and made pop popular in the best sense, as in "of the people". In New York the Ramones wrote speeded-up songs that lasted for two minutes and played 20 of them back-toback. The British punks stretched it to three minutes, maximum. At first they weren't as good at their instruments as Johnny, Joey and Dee Dee. But they learned fast, and so did their audiences. In Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Londonderry, Edinburgh, Dundee, punk was the cue to buy (or steal) an instrument and start a band. As long as you knew, or could learn, three chords on a guitar, and could follow a 4/4 beat, you were in with a chance.

As in the other great northern cities, punk in Glasgow was very much a second wave of hand-me-down fashion and music. I wasn't a full-blooded punk (few in Scotland were), because gobbing didn't appeal, bondage scared the hell out of me, and with a few exceptions, the music was just too raw to provide much satisfaction beyond that initial rush of adrenaline. What punk brought to us, though, was a radical new aesthetic, and the confidence to do it ourselves. You didn't need classical training, or a taste for 20-minute prog rock epics to put together a three-chord, three-minute wonder that could get the place heaving. One of Glasgow's liveliest late-1970s nights was at the Doune Castle pub in Shawlands, where The Alleged played The Light Pours Out Of Me and Janie Jones with as much conviction as the original artists. They sounded as good as the Buzzcocks and The Clash, because they were as good.

Johnny And The Self-Abusers played there too, my Holyrood Secondary classmates Brian McGhee and Charlie Burchill using punk as a stepping stone to their world-beating turn as Simple Minds.

THE Alleged were pals, and watching them made me want to join in, so I formed a band with a couple of fellow southsiders who were also in first year English at Glasgow University. We called ourselves The International Spies, after a line from a novel by French erotic writer Anais Nin. That wasn't very punk, and neither were we, with our ripped T-shirts and tight jeans set off by dodgy moustaches and mascara. By then we were "new wave", aspiring to the post-punk sounds of Joy Division and Wire more than the thrash of Sham 69. What we had learned from punk was that less was more, and that the threeminute pop song was a thing to be respected. We covered Lou Reed's Vicious and Talking Heads' Psycho Killer, and wrote a few half-decent songs of our own. My personal favourite was Things To Do Tonight, a tasteless tale of a teenage serial killer performed while wearing a white rubber suit of the

type worn by Glasgow council sewage workers and a stocking over the head. Nice. [See byline photo].

In the best tradition of rock'n'roll, The International Spies self-destructed at the Doune Castle one night in 1978, with an on-stage stramash involving the obligatory mad drummer, a moody lead guitarist and me as a slightly up-himself front man. Cymbals were tossed, noses split open, and Doc Marten-shod feet aimed wildly (and ineffectually) at heads. The audience clapped and cheered, assuming it was part of the act. In fact it was the inglorious end to another of the hundreds of bands that launched in the wake of punk, only to burn out before reaching the required escape velocity. For six months or so we were contenders, reaching the dizzy heights of hiring Simple Minds' van for one of our gigs, driven by drummer Brian McGhee himself. A year later they were being described as the new Rolling Stones by NME, while I was being pursued for the money owed on the Spies' now redundant amplifiers

and speakers.

But even to fail was exhilarating. To put on make-up and silver lame trousers and play loud, atonal, angry music to a Nitshill pub crowd on a Saturday night was the kind of experience no boy should miss, and one on which I've continued to draw these past 30 years. I looked like a prat, and sounded like one too, but you know what? I did it.

Beyond the myriad individual revolutions of the mind which it provoked, the stripped-down aesthetic of punk fuelled a renaissance in pop music. Without punk Bowie would never have found his way back from cocaine hell to the minimalist greatness of Low and Heroes. In Scotland there would have been no Simple Minds, no Postcard, no Rezillos, no Associates, no Skids, no Lloyd Cole And The Commotions, no Franz Ferdinand. During its brief explosion, punk seeded a decade and more of the best pop music Britain, and Scotland, ever produced. It evolved into new wave, then the synth pop of The Human League and the new romantics, and still has echoes in the DIY, like-it-or-lump-it ethos of Belle And Sebastian, Arab Strap and Mogwai. The Kaiser Chiefs anthem I Predict A Riot is retro-punk to the core.

Most of the punk bands were instantly forgettable, and most of the music is unlistenable today. Some, including The Clash and the Pistols, evolved into bloated stadium rockers, with music to match and sell-out come-back tours. On the reissue shelves of Fopp, HMV and Virgin you'll find the Ramones nestling next to Rush, and The Clash next to prog-rockers Camel. What were once iconoclastic provocations are now just footnotes in our cultural history. Without them, though, Britain in 2006 would look and sound like a very different place.