Never mind the iPods

30 years ago punk rock shocked the nation, today the spirit of that revolt is just another commodity.

'No Elvis, Beatles or the Rolling Stones ... in 1977," the late Joe Strummer once snarled. Thirty years on, the surviving members of the punk rock elite have succumbed to a destiny they must have seen coming: being co-opted into the canon and held to be as "classic" as the icons they affected to despise. Now there comes the 30th anniversary of punk's high summer, already celebrated by an educational "1977 punk special" in the NME ("Thirty years on, music still reverberates to the jolt of the year when the Sex Pistols and the Clash declared a new world order"), and the publication of Babylon's Burning, a 700-page punk history by Clinton Heylin.