In mid-1977, as punk slowly started to spread around the country, we would pick up whatever small handful of records were released on the indie labels springing up.

Quality was less important than adherence to the cause. And with their cartoonishly angry thrashing, matched to cartoonishly angry ‘singing’ and cartoonishly angry lyrics, The Killjoys certainly fulfilled that criterion.

Their first – and last – single was called Johnny Won’t Get To Heaven, released on Raw Records from Cambridge, which had already brought us The Users.

It was a furious tirade expressing the singer’s apparent belief that every other band was rubbish, with a chorus that went “It could be ME” over and over again.

The Killjoys came from Birmingham and had caught the ear of Raw’s Lee Wood performing at what may well have been East Anglia’s only punk night, because we also went to any punk gig, whatever the quality.

By all accounts the quality was not great, but Lee was encouraged by the way the band’s diminutive singer remained undeterrred by the jeering of the other five audience members.

He tracked them down to London, where they were living in their van (and, in the drummer’s case, underneath the van), and brought them back to Cambridge to record this solitary single on his day off.

It became Raw’s best-selling single (18,000) but the band changed line-up and their singer, a hairdresser called Kevin, styled them according to his ego and his ever-changing moods.

By 1980, rebranded as a soul revival group called Dexy’s Midnight Runners, they had their first No.1 with Geno. Lee Wood of Raw said later that he knew at the time Kevin Rowland would be a star.

“I’ve never met anyone so determined. You could read it in his face.” Which is quite something considering how, for all its primal appeal, their single is really pretty terrible.