Burchill tries to bury the racket

During my long and eventful life, I have, so far as I know, pretended to be only three things I was not. That is: a virtuous wife to my first husband, while all the time conducting an affair so torrid it made Last Tango In Paris look like Come Dancing; a Jew, due to teenage angst and empathy taken too far; and a punk, between the years of 1976 and 1978. The first two I look back on with happy memories, as both were the fulfilment of long-held ambitions. The third, however - and the one persona of which I am supposed to be proud - fills me with abject horror.

To have been a punk first time around, to have been one of those who saw the Sex Pistols play the Screen On The Green, as I did (and if all those who have since claimed they were really there had been, that modest moviedrome would have to be at least the size of Wembley Stadium) is to have been present at one of the pulse points of modern youth culture. Even better, it has none of the middle-class wankiness of being at Woodstock, or the ponced-up phoniness of being a New Romantic. Short of being an original Mod (and even this is a little tarnished by the fact that the first Faces are just about ready to qualify for their bus passes), being a real punk gives one the most enormous kudos that childish folly can bestow, especially in the media. (Among the thousands of young hopefuls who applied for the jobs on the New Musical Express, one of which I got, in the summer of 1976 were Sebastian Faulks, the author of Birdsong, and Rod Little, the editor-in-chief of Radio 4's Today programme; whenever I see Rod, he glares at me and says, 'You got my job!')

Punk was the last authentically rebellious music, and the last truly modern music too, a world away from the retro self-loathing of grunge, gangsta rap and mosh metal. (We threw bottles at the Police; rappers do covers of them.) Moreover, in the person of Johnny Rotten - how mighty that name seemed then, and how silly now! - punk had the most charismatic performer popular music has ever seen, and I'm including Elvis, Bowie and Martine McCutcheon. I can see why people look back with envy, and tell me how lucky I was to be there; I just hated it, that's all.

It was such a bloody racket! It didn't help that, for me, there's only ever been one sort of music, and that's black music - dance music, soul, disco, call it what you will; I thought I was living dangerously when I started buying Massive Attack records, as they had one white member! Anyway, anything further from sweet soul music than punk - totally white, male, anti-love, anti-sex - cannot be imagined. After a miserable three hours at the Roxy or the Vortex, witnessing once again The Lurkers droning or The Drones lurking, I would have to return to my lowly room and wipe all that aural damage away with a blast of the Isley Brothers doing 'Live It Up' or 'Summer Breeze' - sanctuary.

So good riddance to it, I say - it was all a load of sound and fury, signifying next to nothing. Only someone who had never been involved in any real political action - be it against the arms race, or racism, or in favour of animal rights or feminism - could have mistaken all that big-baby petulance for politics, with a hammer and sickle on one arm and a swastika on the other. At the end of the day, no matter what poor simple Julian Temple keeps insisting in his new film The Filth And The Fury, revolutionaries do not go into the entertainment business. It may behove entertainers to pretend to be revolutionaries, but they are driven by the same thing that Freud says drives all artistes; wealth, fame and beautiful lovers. Hence Malcolm McLaren capitalised on his fame to pull Lauren Hutton, albeit briefly, and make commercials for the Twirl chocolate bar. While John Lydon has resided in sunny Los Angeles with the most beauteous and clever German newspaper heiress for the past decade, reminding one of what the room-service waiter said when he came bringing champagne to George Best, tipping £50,000 cash onto the bed while Miss World looked on in her undies; 'George - where did it all go wrong!'

No matter what the public-school pundits read into punk, it was less a political yearning than a personal desire to get a piece of the cake; rebels with no cause other than our own, as is always the case with music-based youth movements. We jumped on board because when you're working-class, opportunities to break away/move on up come few and far between. It was as selfish, as excellent, as proto-Thatcherite as that - gimme some!

Why are some people so intent on adopting such a painstakingly curatorial attitude towards punk, when the beauty of it - like that of all youth movements - was its very transience; shooting up like a Pentecostal flame only to fall back, exhausted, after its day in The Sun? What sort of anally retentive no-lifer would wish to endlessly live back their lives on a loop as they were 23 years ago, for God's sake? I'll tell you what sort; exactly the kind of 'ippies (said with sardonic sneer) that we wanted so badly to destroy - ancestor worship and woolly-minded nostalgia, the Heritage Britain approach taken even now to youth culture, with each nightclub a mausoleum and every bondage suit a shroud. For the first time in my life, it makes me feel like coming over all punk. Kick it over! Burn it down! Let it go!