The early music I heard was Top of the Pops. But in bedrooms, around the house with my brother playing the Sex Pistols, Sham 69 and the Ham and all these groups then going into that sort of mod turnover scene and then going into the New Romantics scene the coming of age myself in the mid-eighties and into the noughties, it was changing.

I went to visit Alcatraz years ago when I was on tour with the Pistols, and I really liked the atmosphere of the place. I genuinely, really, thoroughly enjoyed the whole morning there. I just liked the quietness and stillness of what is basically a cruel prison complex. I still found some kind of joy in that. That's how I am.

But when I was a teenager, I was in my room learning how to play bass by listening to Rush and the Sex Pistols. I wasn't reading Karl Marx.

Elvis Presley, The Rolling Stones, David Bowie and The Sex Pistols may come and go, but rebellion remains a key part of the rock n' roll experience. However, that rebellion - the outgrowth of a youthful search for independence and identity - doesn't always take the same form.

My very first gig was with the Sex Pistols, and it was also our first-ever gig. It was a very short set, and it was at Saint Martins College of Art in 1975. We were opening up for a band called Bazooka Joe, and their bass player at the time was Adam Ant, who went on to form Adam and the Ants.

In his suicide note, Kurt Cobain wrote, "It's better to burn out than to fade away." He was quoting a Neil Young song about Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols. When I was twenty-four, I interviewed John Lennon. I asked him about this sentiment, one that pervades rock and roll. He took strong, outraged exception to it. "It's better to fade away like an old soldier than to burn out, " he said. "I worship people who survive. I'll take the living and the healthy.

Time has no divisions to mark its passage there is never a thunder-storm or blare of trumpets to announce the beginning of a new month or year. Even when a new century begins it is only we mortals who ring bells and fire off pistols.

It's so great in Hollywood now. You have people past 40 sitting and talking about serious stuff writing and making movies and TV but there's laser pistols and superheroes and alien monsters involved. It's viable and mainstream.