Punk pioneers play Brighton nearly 50 years on

It will be the first headline tour for the band, known for singles including Don't Dictate, Firing Squad, Come Into The Open and Beat Goes On, since promoting their album Resolution in 2015. The band will be performing their debut album Moving Targets in full along with other classics from their lengthy career.

Pauline Murray, from the band, can't quite believe that punk is very nearly 50 years ago: “It's a whole lifetime. It's your life but I don't really go with figures and numbers that much. But it is a lifetime.”

But she's glad to have been part of it all: “We were so lucky. It was such a sea change, such a seismic shift in people's attitudes and people's thinking. It was a youth thing. It was young people trying to take things into their own hands and to say what was wrong with the world and trying to put it right. It was young people with a lot of energy and a lot of creativity. You look at it as before punk and after punk, and after punk was very different. Before punk it was very accomplished musicians, r’n’b and heavy metal and working men's club bands but then the Sex Pistols came along and all the other bands and it just felt so very empowering. There was a big price before that put on being able to play your instruments. It was all about being a good musician and people put a lot of work into being a good musician. Punk was the opposite. It was people that had never picked up an instrument before. Before punk it was all 20-minute drum solos and 20-minute guitar solos where people could show off their virtuosity but then punk came along, and it was all very, very different. Punk wasn't like that. You didn't purport to be a great musician. It was the opposite really. It was all anti-establishment.

“Punk got up people's noses and there was something about it that was threatening to people and their lives and their thoughts. It was like punk was a dirty thing. It was swearing and it was coming out with stuff that people usually didn't say. It was people with a different view. Punk was probably from the American expression punk meaning someone that you look down on, a bit of a loser and a no-hoper and I think punk embodied that. And the lyrics were quite shocking. Deliberately shocking. It was what the Sex Pistols came out with.

“Punk is pretty much a cliche now these days. It has been assimilated and picked over to the point where it's almost meaningless but it is still popular. But I am still a punk. I don't class being a punk as looking like the cliched punk. But it's still within me. It's an attitude. It's a way of thinking and in that sense I would definitely say I'm still punk. I certainly haven't changed my thoughts in that respect radically. I have stuck to my principles. It's still about treating others as you would want to be treated yourself and I still think that the establishment is rotten to the core.”