If you asked a teenager today what punk was about, there�s a good chance they�d say something along the lines of safety pins and a mohican haircut, with a skateboard thrown in to bring things up to date. It�s sad, but true, that punk is largely remembered now as a fashion when it was supposed to be anti-fashion. In his book No Irish, No Blacks, No Dogs, John Lydon makes the point that history is just the winners telling everyone else how clever they are, and so it has been left to the journalists and photographers to rewrite punk in a long stream of surrealist theses and expensive coffee-table photo albums.

The punk I remember had nothing to do with the way you dressed. It was open to everyone, no matter what you looked like or where you came from. It was about content over appearance, another sort of style that didn�t rely on how much money you had. True, there were different strands to punk, and the fashion victims couldn�t wait to move on and become new romantics, but for a lot of people it was something that shaped their lives. Many of those who have ended up writing punk�s history would probably sneer at the idea, but it�s true, even if they find the whole thing a little embarrassing in their quest for the next big thing.

Another version of punk were the good-time bands, rock n roll in the style of the Ramones, great music with simple words that boasted about being dumb when obviously they weren�t, not when you can come up with a 45 like Sheena Is A Punk Rocker. The Ramones punk was pure no-nonsense fun, worth a ticket and a pint and a good night out. And then there were the bands who were largely defined by their lyrics, the ones who took it a bit more seriously. They had a laugh, but were busy putting social and political literature to their music. This is the strand that has been most ignored in the rewrite.

Punk was diverse, but it had a special energy, a natural progression through decades of herbert culture, from the Teddy Boys in the 50s through the skinheads of the 60s to the boot boys of the 70s, via Elvis Presley and David Bowie. It was music that blew right off the football terraces and into the charts, an aggression that was spotted and manipulated by older entrepreneurs. Britain in the late 70s was a tense society with massive social changes taking place, and punk offered a non-party-political view of life.

The hippies had big world statements and love and peace, but punk was concerned with things closer to home, in the pub and on the high street, in the football grounds and magistrate�s courts. Singing with an English accent made songs about getting your head kicked in because of something that you�d said more real than hearing it in a fake American drawl, and because of these local concerns punk was more relevant. A punk love song was a contradiction in terms, unless it was along the lines of Borstal Breakout. But Jimmy Pursey was always a romantic anyway, the man who called punk white soul music.

Punk also continued a British love affair with black music, something that stretches back to the jazz and boogie-woogie of the pre-war years and continues through rhythm n blues and soul to bluebeat and ska and finally into the reggae of the 70s that was gobbled up by punks in the same way the skins did with ska. The punk DIY ethic and dub techniques are something that have powered today�s best music. Bands like the Clash and the Ruts were quick to incorporate reggae into their music, with White Man (In Hammersmith Palais) and Jah Wars among their best songs. As such they were pioneers.

But it was the words that mattered most. And once punk had made its mark and the PR men had invented new wave to water things down, 2-Tone arrived with a speeded-up ska beat and another set of social lyrics, and then when things started going soft again along came Oi!, the hardest crew yet, stripping the music down and going back to basics, again with some fine writers on-board. Violence ruined things in the end, but sometimes it�s only the threat of violence that stops the vultures swooping down and taking over, inevitably sanitising and ruining a culture. The media targeted Oi! and destroyed it, and punk went underground. Dance and disco won the war, but at least punk left behind a belief that anyone could go out and achieve anything they wanted.

This belief is more common nowadays, but it hasn�t always been so. Techno and acid house made the most of this ethos, and much of the current music scene is infused with a strong DIY spirit. Some bands kept trying to influence the mainstream Carter put punk lyrics in the charts while Blaggers ITA embraced hip-hop, a natural link between punk and rap that too many people seemed to miss, worthy successors to the likes of the Clash and Ruts. Despite this, music with social lyrics was been edged out and remains so to this day.

That�s not to say there hasn�t been some great music since, there has, but it is more to do with sound drum n bass, hip hop, jungle. Rap was lyrical but American based, not so relevant to life here, the better hip hop swamped by gangster concerns. However, while the social realism of punk hasn�t really survived in the music being produced today, one area where it has had a major influence is in the new literature that has emerged in the last five or six years. In some ways, the great punk writers of the late 70s and early 80s are a missing link in an alternative British literature tradition.

Authors such as Stewart Home, Ben Richards, Alan Warner and Irvine Welsh have all come through the ranks and made their mark with a string of successful novels. Existing on the outside of the literary establishment, the style of their writing differs but is linked by its imagination and openness, something that is very different to the work produced by the literary elite. Their books talk about everyday people from the East End of London to the mountains of Scotland. And there is not a polo neck jumper or a cravat in sight but rather trainers and Timberland boots, with a sprinkling of Ben Sherman and Stone Island for good measure.

Their books have sold well, and this is something that is forgotten about the best punk records from the Pistols, Clash, Sham, Ruts, Specials, Jam, yet too often these books have been marginalised by the reviewers, the authors concerned treated as working-class novelties rather than looked at for the meaning of their words, the subjects they are covering. This attitude mirrors the official attitude towards punk.

Before the lyrics of punk you had to go back to the late 50s and early 60s to find literature that really connected with the general population, and achieving this means selling novels and creating an impression. England has been badly represented over the years, the Irish and Scots possessing a more open attitude towards books. Literature has traditionally belonged to those with money, an elite who obey strict rules, their terms of reference and influences totally different from the authors mentioned. While establishment authors find their references in Greek myth and ancient Latin texts, the likes of Stewart Home are going to be more interested in a bagel shop at the end of Brick Lane, or a decent row at Easter Road in the case of Irvine Welsh.

America, with its long trail of imaginative writers Henry Miller, Woody Guthrie, Hubert Selby Jr, John Fante, Nelson Algren, Charles Bukowski, even the Beat Generation hasn�t had the same prejudices, and has never had to refer to a set of classical references. There is a freedom to their writing that dwarfs most of their contemporaries on this side of the Atlantic. With the bounce of ideas back and forwards between Britain and the US, it wasn�t just the rock n roll of the Ramones that influenced punk. It wasn�t a shock to see Strummer and the Clash with Allen Ginsburg, or Bukowski touted as a punk.

Of course, England has produced some brilliant, freethinking authors. George Orwell and Aldous Huxley were honest men ready to confront the issues of the time, namely totalitarianism and the changing nature of Western society, the technological march that has changed us into the money-mental science laboratory we live in today. Their classic novels 1984 and Brave New World are as relevant now as they were in the era of Stalin and Hitler, and it is easy to see the influence they had on society at large. In Orwell�s case, his essays on class and the political system are as true today as they ever were, while Huxley�s work on psychedelics was also way ahead of its time.

Then there are the likes of Frank Norman and Gerald Kersch, authors who wrote in the common language of the 30s, 40s and 50s, moving through the streets of London chronicling Soho with the sort of slang that was badly missed in the 70s and 80s, part of a group of authors whose subject matter was neatly labelled lowlife by the publishers and reviewers, their work so sidelined by the establishment that most of their books remain out of print today. And Norman and Kersch are just two of a number of brave authors shoved to the side and quietly forgotten, a whole tradition ignored.

Then there was the arrival of Alan Sillitoe with his two massive early novels Saturday Night & Sunday Morning and The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner. These books kicked-off a long and successful career that boasts thirty novels and a variety of other books, Sillitoe�s most recent novel, Birthday, published this year. Tagged an angry young man, a term he finds amusing, the term mirrors the unimaginative, all-embracing LadLit label applied to today�s writers, something that doesn�t go any further than the fact the authors are male!

The influence Sillitoe has had is hard to measure, but his name cuts across social classes most people know who he is, and could you say the same about John Osborne? Or even Aldous Huxley? That is a special achievement, to go beyond the normal book buyers and reach the people who don�t usually read novels not because they can�t but because their lives are very rarely represented in print. Other Northern writers came through at the same time, but it was Sillitoe who kept going and stuck to the task, true to his ideals and beliefs. Reading Birthday today, his prose is as solid and honest as it was when his first book was published.

How much influence Orwell, Huxley and Sillitoe had on the generation of songwriters who gave punk its verbal edge is impossible to say, but there are hints. In a different age the likes of Joe Strummer and Malcolm Owen might have made their mark with books, but in the 70s it was music that offered ordinary people an outlet for their ideas. John Lydon said that one of the best things for him about being in the Sex Pistols was the literature. If punk is remembered for anything it should be for keeping the idea of a common literature alive during hard times.