It’s 50 years since an assortment of scruffy youths from the leafy suburb of Bromley, the grimy streets of Finsbury Park and under the Westway gathered together, often in art colleges, to form ‘punk’. They will be celebrated this summer – but more for what they became than what they were.

The Clash became the towering public statues of rebel rock. Johnny Rotten again became John Lydon – musical adventurer and perpetual irritant. Siouxsie Sioux became the unwitting, and unwilling, inventor of goth. The Damned became national treasures. The ones we remember wrote books, took up acting, went where the wind took them. They didn’t stay punks. Not like Charlie Harper. When he first came across the punks, he didn’t see anything new. They simply reminded him of when he’d been a kid.

‘Rock’n’roll came to town in the mid-1950s, and I was one of the first in school to latch on to that. I ended up being social secretary and putting on dances.’

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Harper wasn’t like the other punks. The first record Harper remembers wasn’t Elvis doing ‘Heartbreak Hotel’, or the Stones doing ‘Satisfaction’, or Bowie doing Ziggy. It was Vera Lynn singing ‘The White Cliffs of Dover’: he was born in 1944, a war baby, and a decade older than everyone else at the Roxy.

Still, in the great game of ‘I woz a punk before you woz a punk’, Harper wasn’t quite among the absolute first. He wasn’t at the first Sex Pistols show in 1975, but the bassist of his then band was and came back and told him all about it. Harper started to go to a gay club in Covent Garden called Chaguaramas, which one week turned into the Roxy, London’s first punk club, and he was sold. His pub rock band, the Marauders, became his punk rock band, UK Subs, and he was away.........

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