THE very first photo I saw of the Sex Pistols/Johnny Rotten was during a toilet break from class at school. On the way down the stairs I noticed a photocopied black-and-white poster for the school debating society: "Punk rock – what does it mean?" I was instantly drawn to the photograph and stood there looking at it for ages, unable to pull myself away and back up to the classroom. On the poster there was a strange/shocking looking guy down on his knees on a stage with brutally shorn/spiked hair looking like it had been cut with a broken bottle. He was wearing a crew-neck jumper that had been ripped all the way from the bottom up to the collar at the side. It was worn over a white shirt with a short, rounded, 1960s collar, his trousers looked like they were made of shiny mod/1960s tonic fabric and were slightly baggy and had turn-ups. On his feet he was wearing 1950s teddy boy brothel creepers with big chunky soles. There was a pint glass and smashed up microphone stand lying across the stage directly in front of him and he was screaming into a microphone with violent, terrified eyes. I’m guessing this was early 1977. I had to find out about punk rock and who this guy was. I did and it changed my life.

Before the music there was the image. As a teenager growing up in the 1970s during the glam and punk rock years, I was assaulted by an overload of images that challenged and stimulated my imagination: men in make-up wearing their hair like girls, bedecked in feather boas in rock and roll space costumes made of gold/silver/electric blue/purple lame – the androgynous freak-out of glam was burned into my psyche through weekly viewings of Top Of The Pops (TOTP) and hearing the T-Rex, Gary Glitter, Sweet, Slade, Suzie Quattro, Mott The Hoople, Alice Cooper, Sparks, David Bowie and Roxy Music hit singles, which I loved, on the top 40 radio my mum would play as I was getting ready for school in the mornings.

Some things just stick in your mind. There was the black fedora/man’s three-piece suit Lulu wore singing The Man Who Sold The World on TOTP, Bowie in a baggy blue suit, Ziggy spike grown out into a soul-boy flick surrounded by black dancers grooving to Golden Years on Soul Train: a horror-eyed Alice Cooper in tight black leather pants and shirt with a duelling sword singing School's Out on TOTP. Marc Bolan’s glitter star face make-up, corkscrew curls, feather boas and silver satin jacket. Or his black satin jacket with a blue and silver striped wide lapel, boys dressed as girls, girls dressed as boys.

Rock and roll has always been androgynous. Elvis, Little Richard, The Stones, Jim Morrison, Lou Reed, Iggy, Bowie, Bolan, New York Dolls, Sex Pistols, Siouxsie, Joan Jett and The Runaways ... what’s gender? Just some patriarchal control sh*t. F*** that.

My first punk show was The Clash and Richard Hell & The Voidoids at Glasgow Apollo in October 1977. Nothing could have prepared me for the shock of seeing real live punk kids for the first time. I was buying all the latest punk 7” singles and albums and reading NME and Sounds every week but until that night I’d never seen anyone else who was into the scene at all. As I turned left into the pedestrian precinct at the intersection of where Sauchiehall Street meets Renfield Street, there they were ... hundreds of punk rockers in a line waiting to see The Clash: girls in ripped tights, fishnets, suspenders, 1960s stiletto heels ... in oversized men’s white shirts with punk slogans scrawled on them in paint, chalk, felt pen, like “No Future”, “Pretty Vacant", “Boredom", worn under short, bum-freezer schoolboy blazers which had been ripped apart and put back together again with toilet chains and safety pins.

There were girls with concentration camp haircuts wearing studded dog collars tight around their necks with ghost/vampire white faces, black lipstick, heavily kohled eyes and razor blade earrings or safety pins stuck through the side of their mouths. I saw teenage boys dressed exactly like Johnny Rotten with emaciated faces, burning eyes and slashed, spiky, dyed red hair in home-made “Anarchy” T-shirts wearing tight leather pants and jackboots.

Some were even handcuffed to their friends. Everywhere I looked, people had reinvented/deconstructed themselves. They had slashed through the screen of consensual reality and placed themselves outside of the prevalent 1970s cultural conformism: outsiders by choice. It was a scary sight and I almost didn't go into the show. I felt threatened. I’d been to Celtic v Rangers football matches and witnessed mass violence, but it had never phased me, because growing up in Glasgow, violence was normal. This was different. These kids weren’t spectators, they were actors in their own movie, creating, changing, confronting their own reality. Something inside me made me go back and go into the show. I was changed forever.

As much as I loved punk rock music, I was as equally obsessed by the clothes my favourite bands/artists would wear. In my opinion, the best dressed, most stylish people of that time were Johnny Rotten (John Lydon), Paul Simonon of The Clash and Siouxsie Sioux. There’s no such thing as a bad photo of Lydon from 1976-81. His sense of style was incredible. He could put anything together and make it work: brothel creepers, tartan bondage trousers, a pith helmet, kids swimming goggles, old men’s baggy demob suits from the 1940s.

I particularly love the Kenny McDonald blue glitter tuxedo he wore with dark striped peg trousers in the promo video for the first Public Image Ltd (PIL) single Public Image – very teddy boy, very rock and roll, but new.

As a punk/post punk obsessed teenager I noticed every single change in image and was influenced by the new ideas and images that people like Rotten/Lydon or the Banshees would present with every new record they released. I remember going down to Paddy’s Market at the Trongate in Glasgow looking for old men’s baggy suits and white shirts and thin striped ties (or tartan), trying to put together a look like early PIL. When we made it down to London we would always go up to Robot on Kings Road and buy black leather or suede pointed shoes with either a lace up or a cross buckle with a thin Doc Marten sole, George Cox brothel creepers. When you’re young, you don’t have a lot of money but you do have a lot of time and I spent mine listening to records and looking in second-hand clothes stores, junk shops and jumble sales for cool clothes.

To paraphrase Malcolm McLaren and Vivienne Westwood, clothes can make you feel heroic. With the right combination of sharp threads, you can have the courage to do anything. Clothes instantly change your identity. You can dream your way through life in the right costume.

Fashion is transient but style is forever.

Extracted from The Bag I'm In: Underground Music And Fashion In Britain, 1960-1990 by Sam Knee with a foreword by Bobby Gillespie, published on November 10 by Cicada, £22.95

Raised in Mount Florida, Glasgow, Bobby Gillespie is lead singer and founding member of Primal Scream. He was also the drummer for The Jesus And Mary Chain in the mid-1980s.