It’s March 1977 when The Clash, the second most talked-about band in UK, put out their first single.

White Riot was a statement of intent: a fiery, ferocious call to arms. Strummer, responding to the Notting Hill riots that marred the carnival the previous year, spat out those lyrics.

I wonder how it would be received today. I suspect someone would start a twitter storm suggesting it’s racist. It isn’t – obviously – but I doubt that would make much difference.

By an odd coincidence I remember running into Joe Strummer at the Carnival in 1977, down towards the Westway flyover that they immortalised on the back cover of their album (and where Mick Jones lived with his mum on one of the upper floors of Trellick Tower). And there was another riot.

I bought this single the day it came out. Of course I did; we all did, the few of us who had jumped on the bandwagon as it began to roll. There weren’t enough of us to make it a hit but just seeing one of ‘our bands’ bring out a single on a major label like CBS was a sign that our cult had gone overground.

Of course the daytime Radio 1 DJs of the time – Simon Bates, Tony Blackburn, Noel Edmonds, David Hamilton, Paul Burnett and Dave Lee Travis aka “The Hairy Cornflake” – would have nothing to do with a record like this. It was up to John Peel to fly the flag. And fly it he did, playing both the A-side and the B-side, 1977, with its famous (and now faintly risible) refrain: “No Elvis, Beatles or Rolling Stones in 1977.”

I now see there are two versions of the song: this is the single, recorded back in 1976, which begins with police sirens.