"I cared deeply about what we were doing with the Pistols and it was hurtful to be put in a ‘punk’ package alongside lesser mortals,” Rotten explained. “But the Raincoats offered a completely different way of doing things, as did X-Ray Spex and all the books about punk have failed to realise that these women were involved for no other reason than that they were good and original. “It’s a million miles away from the blancmange that is Green Day, where you have a Johnny Rotten first verse, a Billy Idol chorus and a Sham 69-second verse. Preposterous"

"They're so great. I've heard this, and I don't know if it's true, but they are one of the most sampled bands in hip hop. They are so fucking ahead of their time too. They're still together too, that's so cool. What is there to say? Innovative. Ahead of their time. Powerful. From The Bronx. Three black women, a family affair. It was punk. They were one of those groups respected by everybody and could acknowledge that they're one of the most groundbreaking bands for them. They really changed the sound of things. Without them I don't think there would have been a bass-driven punk, new-wave scene. I like to think of people in the New York punk scene going to see ESG shows and thinking it was really good. At dance parties if you put on an ESG song people will lose their fucking minds. It's one of the best things to watch ever. "

"I wasn’t really a punk. I was about 16 when that album came out. But I was living above Maples, a carpet shop near Tottenham Court Road, and it was right by Capital Radio, and I remember suddenly these 14-foot letters appeared in spraypaint on Capital‘s windows, ‘THE CLASH’! And there was a thing in Melody Maker, where I heard about this club called The Roxy at Covent Garden, so I went down there. Me and my friends already looked a bit skinhead-y, suedehead-y, and I had this mohair suit, but the connection was that the punks had straight trousers in this world of flares and Kevin Keegan hairdos. Nobody was wearing Vivienne Westwood clothing: there was a guy in a dinner jacket painted pink, and someone else in a boiler suit they’d made themselves, and it was really DIY. The tribalism between mods and skinheads and punks hadn’t really started at that time, and it hadn‘t fractured into a million pieces yet. In 1977, if you had short hair, and you were prepared to have someone call you a fucking cunt in your ear for it, you were in. I saw a band called Eater at the Roxy, whose average age I later found out was 14. And I first heard The Clash’s ‘1977’ and ‘White Riot’ on record there. I felt like I was at the advent of something new. I liked punk, and I liked the attitude, but by 1978 we had our own thing going. But I always had a soft spot for The Clash, because they had the reggae thing, like us, and there was a bit of soul in their music, for want of a better word. Joe Strummer definitely had a bit of soul in his voice. Every fucking track on that album’s brilliant, but my favourite’s ‘London’s Burning’. And they were fucking brilliant live. And we [2 Tone bands] wouldn’t have had anywhere to play if it wasn’t for punk. You had pub rock informing punk, and punk informing us, and The Specials were a direct amalgam of punk and ska, and we realised that the faster we played, the more likely we could get the crowd jumping up and down, which was a legacy of punk. All these different movements, fracturing then coming back together. You’d need 60,000 sociologists to untangle those couple of years."