John Lydon has taken Big Malcolm to court (surely the Sex Pistols are not the little eunuchs?) and while I write nobody quite knows what the outcome of this shooting match will be except that Virgin Records will emerge smiling.

Unlike many people I don't regard this as the end of the age of innocence. Punks were never innocent. It's easy to envisage the spectre of monolithic record companies laughing, up their capitalistic sleeves, pointing the dollar sign finger at Lydon and McLaren and shrieking: see, so much for punk politics, it always comes down to the bottom line in the end. As if to imagine punks Wanted to stay poor. It's the same belief that keeps the right wingers here (as elsewhere) stuck with the ludicrous thought that the left, in their efforts to remove the power base from a few to the many, would have us all in grey graffiti tower blocks. The idea, my friends, is to do away with them completely.

Ah well. Rotten v. Glitterbest came down to the account bodks and royalty statements. Cook and Jones finally come down on Rotten's side, leaving McLaren out there languishing, it would appear, at the tail end of poor Sid's death in lonely New York. Malcolm now jaunts to Paris to make a record himself. The Great Rock-And Roll Swindle is out. The album is the soundtrack of the Pistol's Who Killed Bambi? film which ran into financial trouble early on and is now one of their major assets. Nobody,knows when it will come out. The album got expectedly mixed reviews here. It includes a French version of "Anarchy In The UK" sung by an unknown Frenchman; the original "Belsen Is A Gas" and a further version by Ronald Biggs, the man McLaren tried to make the perfect foil to keep the Pistols anarchic image going despite everything. Rotten was not pleased.

One of the "promo" posters for the album is a picture of Sid surmounting a picture of a "real life" Sid doll' in a coffin. People have been going into shops asking where they can buy the doll. Sid's mum thinks it's great.

Britain in 1979 bemoans the end of punk aggression and punk "innocence" and wonders why it didn't change the world. The rock press here is, by and large, disillusioned and it shows. They barrack the Clash and feel let down. I like the Clash album. I still think Mick Jones is a more charismatic figure live than Joe Strummer; I still , opine that within the limitations Clash are probably being as honest as they can be. Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone thought the album was tremendous, here they thought it was tired. The truth, as they will insist on saying, lies somewhere in between.

They've given Tom Robinson a Hard ride, too. At some point towards the end of last year Robinson fell out of grace almost as swiftly as he'd come in. Still smarting at the reviews for the Christmas concert in London with Peter Gabriel (where the arrival on stage of a bunch of—to them, mates, to the rest of us—super clique, including the rotund piano player with glasses, appeared to dent somehow his rareified political commitment). Now his second album, TRB Two, the one Todd Rundgren was flown over to cut, has come in for a pasting. The general idea seems to be that politics and "commercialism" don't mix; that there are no musical ideas on the album that haven't been done to death before; that Tom is no longer making the clearly defined statements that made him unique— even with Clash around; tales of fighting behind the barricades, nefarious deeds in Whitehall, etc. I think I like it better than his first. A qualifying point: it may mean my ears are attuned to accepting a certain smoothness of recorded product more easily, or simply that after you've seen as many live TRB gigs as I have the first album sounded empty and certainly did not bear re-playing. I only put it on twice. It's true perhaps that the music itself is derivative. But these days everything sounds wrong. The new Frankie Miller album makes him sound like a cross between Leo Sayer and Rod Stewart and, worse, the backing's too precise; the new ex-Family man Roger Chapman has an album that has too much backing and hence no dynamics. Critics here, me included, feel that we must say The Final Word on a musician. We are rarely pleased, much less enthusiastic. These days idols crumble away at such a rate. Everyone here gets disappointed. How can Tom Robinson be political and commercial? The trouble seems to be that we are unable to cope with contradictions. Still, his album won't change the world. And unless you pay some attention you might not even realise what the sPngs are really about at all. On the other hand I'd always thought that most of the people who sang "Glad To Be Gay" were, in true rock tradition, more caught up with the spirit of the chorus than the spirit of the letter.

It's interesting to see the comparison between Robinson's effect on the critics and the way they approach Sham 69. They feel somehow betrayed by Tom I think. On the other hand Sham's lead singer Jimmy Pursey has had to pull out of live gigs for an unspecified period because of his fans' violence, and the critics lavish upon him great sympathy. "Pursey In Tears" read the headlines; poor old Jimmy reads the copy. Truly an innocent in the middle of World War III. Nobody seems to feel Pursey has had anything to.do with all this. Maybe it's because Robinson always was acute to the ways of audience and record business and articulated it. When someone like that lays their head on the line how can they not expect it to be chopped off? But Pursey and Sham 69? Only the NME's Julie Burchill and I—both early admirers—seemed to have had enough of Jimmy's over zealous, over-naive, working class misunderstood kid approach by the time "Hurry Up Harry" came out. I can't imagine a Pursey and Sham gig translated to America: the KKK turning up for Bob Seger? I don't know. Here is the dilemma: Sham 69 started out with a hard-core following of skinheads (kids with hair cut like bog brushes, heavy boots, macho image). Some of these were perfect fodder it seems for the National Front and British Movement (a bunch whose hobby it is to pounce on and sometimes kill persons whose skin is not the same colour as their own: white). Jimmy veered from admitting there was such an element in his audience, but they weren't the "true" fans, to denying it wholesale. But his role was always to identify—he vvith them, them with him. Well, finally something went wrong. At a London Polytechnic gig Jimmy's "kids" got out of hand. They took over the stage. At whichpoint they were bounced off again by Sham's new breed of bouncers, large as Texan sheriffs and probably as mean. BBC film cameras in situ didn't help. Finally Pursey threatened to leave the stage and found that this trick just didn't work. Factions laid into each other with a vengance. End of debacle. Of course Jimmy didn't understand. Not even that playing "Clobkwork Orange" and "Land Of Hope And Glory" at the beginning of the set was tantamount to begging for bother (neither is a lullaby and both have already firm connotations with the ultra-right) . "The blame cannot be laid at Pursey's door" trumpeted the NME. Where then? Artists have always had a no man's land to manipulate between stage and audience. Pursey took it away but found, like walking on water, he couldn't stand in the air between. After all: tell a certain audience they are you and one day they'll believe it.

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Punk lives on. The Rough Trade tour coincided with the re-launch of Roxy Music. Ferry back with nearly all the originals bar Eno. An extension of musical theatrics and the despair of one star-crossed lover, a return to a line-up I first saw out-doing any,interest in David Bowie at the Rainbow. (Bowie was particularly arch and balletic, refused the band—it was rumoured by the newly formed Roxy entourage—proper rehearsal time. Roxy were extraordinary then. Ferry, Eno, Phil Manzanera practically contorting themselves into early sterility in trying for the limelight). Rough Trade is a little label that was at the forefront of the original (how time flies) punk thing. It started in 1976 as a record shop stocking fanzines, an alternative structure spelling out the punk ethos of DIY in garageland but refusing to stock things by bands calling themselves Raped. The tour has done very well. Stiff Little Fingers have .given the label its first album hit with "Unflammable Material" and—lo—the pogo-ers have returned for them. I remember one Clash gig where a line of frantic pogo persons threatened to trample me underfoot. Very polite they were. Down they bounced in a line. As they reached me one said "Oops, sorry." And they bounced back. Robert Rental and the Normal; Essential Logic. Narpes straight out of the annals of punkdom proved that whatever the critics through!, punk is not really ready to be buried at all. Public Image have been keeping their audiences waiting for hours and then playing just over 30 minutes in a fairly shambolic way. It hasn't gofre down well. Yet I can remember a time when audiences and critics didn't expect anything more.l|g