Writing in the New Musical Express in 1977, Tony Parsons defined the original aim of punk in very clear terms. It was, he said, about writing songs of late 1970s youth culture with accuracy, honesty, perception and genuine anger - all qualities then entirely alien to the rock establishment. People like Elvis Presley and the Rolling Stones, as Parsons put it, "are closer to members of the Royal Family or facelift lard-arse movie stars than they are to you and me". And in the year of Presley's death and Queen Elizabeth's jubilee year, this was all very loaded stuff.
Not that any of it meant anything to me. In 1977 I barely knew who Presley and the Stones were, never mind the Sex Pistols, and I certainly wasn't reading Tony Parsons in the NME. All talk of anger, frustration and teenage rebellion was entirely irrelevant and "the punk revolution" was nowhere to be seen. When a few game punks finally did appear on the Enniskillen's Diamond, people just shook their heads and dismissed them as eejits. Young people in particular just scoffed and laughed that cynical Fermanagh laugh.
And so I missed punk completely. Just as Sid Vicious was unaware of the Summer of Love because he was playing with his Action Man, I missed punk because I was busy singing songs about fairies in the school choir. I'm well aware that many people my age tend to reinvent the late 1970s with tales of safety pins and bondage trousers, but the truth is that Anarchy in the UK meant nothing to an 11-year-old choirboy. I was still wearing whatever my mother had laid out for me and the closest I got to youth culture was the Boy Scouts.
Maybe it was different in Dublin or Belfast, but 1977 in Enniskillen was more about packing my rucksack for Jamborora than getting my ear bitten off at a Clash gig. I was living in some immune parallel world and whatever was supposed to be happening out on the streets it certainly wasn't happening anywhere near me.
I could attempt to rewrite that late 1970s history and fake up my days as a punk, but I'd never get away with it. My mother has the photographs and that jumper was hardly Vivienne Westwood.
The lucky ones were those who lived punk as it happened, those who could enjoy that thrilling sense of the here and now - a feeling the rest of us tried to recapture long after the event. And this perhaps is the real value of a new book called Punk - A Life Apart, compiled by Stephen Colegrave and Chris Sullivan. Crammed full of photographs, it provides an opportunity to see just what exactly was going on in that mad period within and without our own lifetimes. It's an account of what I was missing while singing By The Shortcut to the Rosses and waiting for my voice to break. And instead of pitching tents in Mount Mellary, it proves that there was something far more useful I might have done with my time.
It's a big book. It is, in fact, a punk coffee-table book and you can make of that concept what you will. Largely based on interviews with various players on the punk scene, it is lavishly decorated with photographs of the New York Dolls, the Clash, Cherry Vanilla, the Ramones and the Pistols - including the coup de grace of Johnny Rotten squeezing a spot on his nose. He looks as electrifying as he ever did - that twist in his neck and the insane gaze which goaded and provoked while at the same time making music that is still powerful stuff.
With the appropriate nods to much of what came before, the book kicks off in 1975 - the year the authors contend that punk finally galvanised into being. It was, they say, "an attitude that was expressed mainly through clothing and music". And in that they are correct. Punk wasn't really about music, but it was certainly about attitude. There are, of course, the now- familiar references to Gustav Courbet, Marcel Duchamp, John Heartfield, Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and just about everybody else who may have had something akin to a punk attitude - but all this does is send you thumbing for the pictures. The look on Rotten's face sums it all up much better than any high-falutin' talk.
The progression seems accurate too. Colegrave and Sullivan begin with the Velvet Underground and then, via John Cale, they move to the MC5 and the Stooges. It also serves to remind us that punk really began Stateside and that its actual birthplace was a club called CBGB's at 315 Bowery on Bleecker Street. It was in 1975, when the New York Dolls split up, that the club came into its own. In the rush to replace them, Richard Hell, Wayne County, Television, the Ramones and Patti Smith all emerged in nothing short of a punk frenzy.
In fact, the theory is that the term punk was employed in this context at this time. It had formerly been a term of abuse favoured by James Cagney but now, thanks to a magazine published by Legs McNeill and John Holstrom, the name was attached to that CBGB's scene. So if a scene/attitude can possibly be safety-pinned to a specific date, then 1975 is about right.
It didn't last long either and, for many fans, punk was well over by the end of 1977. The book, however, marks the end of punk as that murky year of 1979. I was out of the school choir by then, but it was too late.
By this stage punk was no more than a posture and its prime movers had all, more or less, rejected it. They began to call the music New Wave and the more talented punks were co-opted by the industry - or else just got on with the music they had really wanted to play in the first place.
In fact, it might well be the case that the flare-up of punk changed absolutely nothing. Perhaps the only things really affected by it were the eager journalists of the NME and the profit margins of Vivienne Westwood. But whatever punk was or was not, the authors of Punk - A Life Apart prefer to define it in the negative.
"It was not," they say, "a headline on the front page of a tabloid newspaper, nor was it conformity, and it was definitely not stupidity." So say two former punks - one of whom went on to be style editor of GQ, while the other became European marketing director of Saatchi & Saatchi.
But for all the Dada and Duchamp and all the betrayals, swindles, re-inventions, sell-outs and scams, I'm still sorry I missed it. It must have been quite the feeling, for once, to have actually been there at that vital moment. And there is no doubt that there was definitely something in the air between 1975 and 1977 that we could certainly do with now.
If ever the music scene needed to be grabbed by its leather lapels, it is now. And so, where are the Pistols when we need them? And where will the Clash be when it finally comes?
Punk - a Life Apart by Stephen Colegrave and Chris Sullivan (Cassell & Co, £35 in UK). Website: www.punkbook.com