I JUST CAN'T BE HAPPY TODAY

VERYBODY GOT PUNK wrong. The message was supposed to be: don’t follow us, do what you want,” said John Lydon many years after he’d abandoned his Rotten alter ego. This issue, as we re-live the year that the Sex Pistols dragged punk into the global mainstream, we also bring you this compilation that gathers 15 tracks from punk’s first flush. Many of these tracks were released in ’77 itself, some in the two or three years that followed. All of them appear to possess an in-built sense of defiance that remains inspiring some 40-odd years later. You can call it nihilism if you want to. We prefer to think of it as the sound of freedom…