From the word go, at the height of the cold war, youth culture was only ever the cleverest way of dividing and ruling and alienating working-class kids from their birthright and selling them a form of rebellion which came complete with all mod cons and built-in obsolescence.

Just think: all that pain, all that struggle, all that class war, suddenly sacrificed – one, two, three o’clock, four o’clock rock! – for a creed which added up to no more than ‘I’m young, you’re old, I hate you! Now buy me those trousers!’

Julie Birchill, Pop Goes the Icon, Mail on Sunday, 6 June 1999