No one owned up to writing the graffiti either: “I think it’s because they can’t spell ‘cunts’ right,” says bassist Michael Bradley. “Who would own up to that?” Crass put out some truly great albums, and perhaps there is none greater in their catalogue than Penis Envy, an impassioned, HMV-banned, 30-minute anarcha-feminist rant that took aim at various facets of female oppression, and featured exclusively female vocals in the form of Eve Libertine and Joy De Vivre. The album won the band a not-insignificant amount of good, old-fashioned tabloid outrage when they successfully managed to pull off a hoax offering a flexi disc single from the album to be given away free with teeny bopper magazine Loving, drumming them up a shit load of free press in the process. Few bands, punk or otherwise, have ever been so controversial. And, yes, they did split up in 1984. Legend goes that the boys were ready to release a single album that would follow in the tradition of their previous work. However, after hearing Husker Du’s double album Zen Arcade they reentered the studio so overflowing with creativity an entire second side was born. That scattershot mess of ideas ultimately serves as the perfect representation of what punk can and should be. Free from constraint, full color and grey, angry and joyous. Punk’s past, present, and future is all here. Why it was so influential: Just listen to virtually any post-punk band making music after the Millennium – Mark E. Smith’s voice is everywhere Gang of Four, ‘Entertainment!’ (1979)

Why it was so influential: Savages brought with them a dose of much-needed mythology, and raised valuable questions about why women in punk are so frequently branded as bolshy or intimidating. Fontaines DC, ‘Dogrel’ (2019) Why it was so influential: Just listen to virtually any ’80s pop record that came out after ‘Dare’ to hear its hallmarks. Elastica, ‘Elastica’ (1995) Traditionally dismissed by a derisory media, Sham 69 have been effectively excised from punk history. It’s not as if they didn’t sell records (a consecutive run of irresistibly hooked late-70s chart singles that left punk contemporaries such as The Clash, Damned and Jam choking on their dust) or become influential (the classic Sham template continues to define today’s street-punk). The truth is that Sham 69 were always just a little too uncomfortably authentic for an essentially middle-class, largely metropolitan music press. As Sham’s vocalist Jimmy Pursey so eloquently nailed it in his lyrics to their breakthrough Angels With Dirty Faces hit: ‘ We’re the people you don’t wanna know, we come from places you don’t wanna go.’ At the time, punk wasn’t that well known in Derry,” reflects guitarist John O’Neill. “We had a core following of 50 people or so, but apart from that we were treated with a lot of suspicion.” The album’s centrepiece, the electrifying New Noise, remains one of the most astonishing calls to arms ever committed to record. Eloquent, charismatic frontman Denis Lyxzen’s screams and whoops are as joyful as they are intense, and they echoed down through the generation of new bands that followed them. The moment, half way through the song, when the sound fades, before building to a truly gargantuan chorus of riotous crowd noise and elephantine riffs, makes you feel absolutely invincible.

Jimmy Eat World, ‘Bleed American’ (2001)

The whole record sounds truly enormous; listening to ‘Mirage’ feels like standing in the shadow of a toweringly spooky castle, while ‘Metal Postcard (Mittageisen)’ proved that aggression can be dished out slowly. And Siouxsie herself has to be one of the best vocalists of the late-’70s – like a severely haunted Velvet Underground and Nico. Why it was so influential: Parquet Courts’ breakthrough moment was so distinctive that it accidentally spawned an entire genre of bands who ‘sound a bit like Parquet Courts’. Savages, ‘Silence Yourself’ (2013) It’s a chance encounter, to be sure: As Jello Biafra joined up with what would become Dead Kennedys in San Francisco, he and his new bandmates discovered he couldn’t play guitar. Instead, he would hum and sing what he thought the music should sound like behind his lyrics, and the players would build compositions from there. The results have punk’s anger, but there’s a particular chug in Klaus Flouride’s bass and twang in East Bay Ray’s guitar that set up rhythmic noise in songs like “Holiday in Cambodia” before crashing down around listeners’ ears come chorus time.

The greatest punk album of all time was made by a band trying to escape punk. Not its intent, force or even attitude, but its implied restrictions and captivity by fundamentalists. The Clash had gently expanded their scope on their second album Give ‘Em Enough Rope, but on London Calling they blew everything apart: styles, dynamics, vantage point and subject matter.Why it was so influential: It’s really impossible to overstate the effect that ‘The Scream’ had on gothic-minded groups like The Cure, Echo and the Bunnymen, and Psychedelic Furs – all post-punk purveyors in their own right. The Fall, ‘Live at the Witch Trials’ (1979)