In what passes for public discourse in Britain, the 1970s were the nightmare decade of the postwar era. The story goes something like this: the militant trade unions, aided and abetted by a left-wing Labour Party and a timid Conservative Party, nearly dragged the country off a cliff. “Calamity,” frowned Sex Pistols singer John Lydon, aka Johnny Rotten, in a 2016 interview with the right-wing Sun newspaper. “There were endless strikes, confusion and garbage everywhere.” Punk, which Lydon had spearheaded, had been a necessary reaction to this uniquely miserable decade.

Since the global financial crisis of 2008, however, a new generation of writers has argued that — in the West, at least — the 1970s was in fact a relative peak of both economic equality and quality of life, matched by an inspiring revolution in cultural, social, and sexual liberation. In this telling, the sense of a great crisis that preceded the 1979 UK general election had been little more than mood music partially engineered by the Conservative Party and its friends in the print media to facilitate its eventual victory. But it was not just the Conservative Party that was fostering grandiose plots to overturn British society.

When the Sex Pistols’ story is told today, so toxic is the legacy of manager Malcolm McLaren that all accounts emphasize the band’s distance from his viewpoint. Both 2000’s The Filth and the Fury documentary and 2022’s FX drama series Pistol gave ample airtime to the band members’ case against McLaren. And what a case — in a 2022 letter to the London Review of Books, McLaren’s own biographer felt the need to list no fewer than twenty-one serious character flaws attributed to his subject. These ranged from callousness and cruelty via narcissism to a near obsession with teenage sexuality. But if our understanding of the 1970s has been radically revised, must we not also revise our understanding of punk’s rebellion against it?