I’m not sure The Runaways were ever really a punk group, but they made their mark at the right time to be part of our world and they were punky enough to play CBGBs alongside Blondie and Television and The Ramones.

I think we all bought this, their debut single, Cherry Bomb, because a band of teenage girls playing rock music with attitude was a big novelty back in 1976.

There were no other girl groups who wrote their own songs and played their own instruments – let along girl groups who were only 17 years old.

The five girls – Cherie Currie (vocals), Lita Ford and Joan Jett (guitars), Jackie Fox (bass) and Sandy West (drums) – came together under the mentorship of Kim Fowley, a shadowy svengali who occupied a similar role in US pop lore to Jonathan King here, with a string of novelty hits under pseudonyms before working his musical magic here with bands ranging from Slade to Soft Machine.

But let’s not dwell too much on his pop genius – he also fired Micki Steele, the first bass guitarist (she went on to join The Bangles), for rejecting his advances… and raped her 16-year-old replacement, Jackie Fox.

The sleazy jailbait image Fowley cultivated for them (he first advertised for an all-female band of 15-year-old girls, and Cherie Currie’s stage costumes tended towards lingerie) worked both ways: it gained The Runaways plenty of attention, but also meant they struggled to be taken seriously as musicians, and songs like this were too risqué for radio at the time.

Despite that, their badass attitude shone through and it’s easy to see now that they inspired a generation of female musicians to form bands. The Runaways weren’t great, but they were fun, and they were the same age as me, and Cherry Bomb is a great pop single.

It didn’t make the charts, but it did earn them enough kudos to play CBGBs alongside the bands who would put punk on the map – Blondie, Ramones, Television, Talking Heads, Patti Smith et al – and they became superstars in Japan.

In America, nothing. For an idea of how misogynist the music industry was back then, Joan Jett was rejected by 23 labels after the band broke up and only started her own, Blackheart Records, because she had no other option.

And here’s a bit of solid-gold pop trivia: after they broke up Jackie Fox (née Fuchs) would quit music and graduate from Harvard Law School alongside a certain Barack Obama.