Words spoken almost half a century ago by a man who meant very little to me at the time, and of whom I had little knowledge and little interest, came to mind when John Lydon failed to become the Irish entry for the Eurovision Song Contest - staged this month in Le Royaume-Uni - as front man of PIL, with the song 'Hawaii'.
These words were spoken in the high season of punk during which I collected my weekly copy of Sounds on the way to school, and perused it en route to the bus stop for the short ride to Camberwell, via the ramp of the brutalist estate completed three years earlier. Work begun in the high season of glam rock ('In every dream home a heartache'), with the final flagstone laid the summer the Philadelphia sound was wafting through walkways and stairwells, as it emanated from the Philips cassette pet belonging to one of our gang. The cogs on a C30 or C60 or C90 tape rolled and MFSB rallied. By 1977 they were raging: 'Let's clean up the ghet…