John Osborne, the world’s principal Angry Young Man, was incensed by that sort of talk. There was a “trough of Queen worship”, he raged, “the National Swill”. And he described monarchy as “the gold filling in a mouthful of decay”. His attack was only to be expected, of course — there’s no point in having Angry Young Men unless they’re working themselves up about something or other.

But other isolated voices of dissent were beginning to be heard, and some were harder to ignore since they came from within what had recently been dubbed “the Establishment”. There was, for example, Woodrow Wyatt, then a Labour MP though later a disciple of Margaret Thatcher. “Mooning about the Royal Family is one of the main contributory factors to Britain’s plight,” he complained in 1956. “It saps our dynamism. It makes us dwell on the past.”

Or there was John Grigg, who could hardly have been more Establishment: Eton, Grenadier Guards, Oxford, Tory parliamentary candidate, latterly the 2nd Baron Altrincham. So when he said rude things about the Queen in his 1957 article “The Monarchy Today” — published in the magazine he edited, the National and English Review — it proved especially controversial.

He was no republican, Altrincham insisted, he was merely seeking to reinvigorate the monarchy, which was too remote, surrounded “almost without exception by people of the ‘tweedy’ sort”. But at the centre of his criticism was the Queen herself. Five years into her reign and she really needed to buck her ideas up. Her public persona was that of “a priggish schoolgirl, captain of the hockey team, a prefect, and a recent candidate for Confirmation”, while her “style of speaking is frankly a pain in the neck”. What was to become of her “when she has lost the bloom of youth”?

The article didn’t win him many new friends. It was roundly condemned by pretty much everyone, from the Archbishop of Canterbury (who hadn’t read it), down to the leader of the Conservative group on Altrincham Council in Cheshire, who wanted to distance the town from the man who bore its name. Nor did the abuse stop there. “Altrincham, if we ever see you in the street, we’ll do you in,” said one of the many letters he received. “You go too flamin’ far when you criticise our Queen.” It was signed: “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”.

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Nothing came of that threat but he was thumped in the face by the Deputy Chairman of the League of Empire Loyalists (a far-Right group that went on to co-found the National Front). The assailant was 64-years-old and didn’t pack much of a punch, so he got off with just a one-pound fine, together with the sympathy of the magistrate: “96% of the population were disgusted and offended by what was written”.

A couple of months later, journalist Malcolm Muggeridge — still then in his incarnation as iconoclast — joined in with his own article, “Does England Really Need a Queen?”, written for the Saturday Evening Post. His analysis was hardly startling. “The British monarchy does fulfil a purpose,” he wrote. “It provides a symbolic head of state transcending the politicians who go in and out of office.” But as he made his way to his somewhat obvious conclusion, he dropped in some wonderfully scandalous titbits of upper-class gossip. “It is duchesses, not shop assistants, who find the Queen dowdy, frumpish and banal,” he revealed. The whole thing had become “a kind of Royal soap opera”.

Like Altrincham, Muggeridge found himself under severe and sustained criticism. Angered by the distorted, misquoted accounts of his article, he consulted a lawyer on whether he could sue for libel, but was told that, while there undoubtedly was a case, “in view of the circumstances, and the particular matter at issue, I could not count upon a jury or a judge taking an unprejudiced view”.

What these early critics demonstrated was that in a world of sycophancy, there was a good deal of media mileage to be made from thumbing one’s nose at the royals. Played right, there was a career in this.

The man for the job was Willie Hamilton. He was a Labour MP from 1950 to 1987, yet the only national coverage he ever received was in his role as an outspoken republican, “the Hammer of the Windsors” as the press liked to call him. He complained about the cost of the monarchy, describing the royal family as “scroungers”, but there was a deeper complaint that sometimes surfaced: the Queen represented a class that had “deeply hurt the class to which I belong and which I represent in our sovereign Parliament”. For years he was Fleet Street’s go-to guy for a bit of outrage on a royal news story; a happy event such as a wedding wasn’t complete without Hamilton carping about the cost. His autobiography was titled Memoirs of an Anti-Royalist, because this had become his identity; effectively he’d been subsumed into that great royal soap opera, the pub cynic who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing.

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Others were drawn in as well. Come the Queen’s Silver Jubilee in 1977, John Grigg, the former Lord Altrincham (he’d renounced his title in the interim), returned to the storyline. This time he praised “her exceptionally steady character” — which was pretty much what he’d condemned her for back in the Fifties. “She looks a Queen,” he now wrote. “She behaves decently because she is decent.”

The Silver Jubilee also saw the soap opera acquire an alternative theme-song: “God Save the Queen” (1977), the second single by punk band the Sex Pistols, sneering about a “fascist regime” and how the Queen (who “ain’t no human being”) “made you a moron”.

It was incendiary stuff, and would have been so at any time, let alone when the Jubilee was reaffirming the nation’s love of monarchy and providing a desperately needed moment of unity in the midst of strife. The promotional artwork, picturing the Queen with a safety-pin through her lip, added visual injury to aural assault. The record was banned by radio and television; it was deplored by MPs; leading retailers declined to stock it, and pub chains refused to have it on their jukeboxes. Meanwhile members of the group were assaulted on the streets by the contemporary equivalents of the “Eight (loyal to the Queen) Teddy Boys”. But the single still shifted 200,000 copies in Jubilee Week alone.

Punk now being associated with anti-monarchy sentiment, others followed, from the underachieving — the Exile’s “Jubilee 77” and the Drones’ “Corgi Crap” (both 1977) — to the over-ambitious: Derek Jarman’s movie Jubilee (1978). But it was the Sex Pistols who became so closely associated with the moment that they got dragged into the soap, not as regular characters, but always there or thereabouts at special times. When the Queen celebrated her Golden Jubilee in 2002, it was marked by a band reunion, accompanied by yet another greatest hits compilation (inevitably titled Jubilee), and a re-release of the offending single, now seemingly part of the ceremonial trappings.

The single was back 10 years later for the Diamond Jubilee, with excited talk of it getting to #1 in Jubilee Week. (It didn’t.) This time, singer John Lydon disowned the whole thing: “I wish for no part in the circus that is being built up around it.” The band also declined an invitation to appear the opening ceremony of the London Olympics that year, though a snippet of “God Save the Queen” was included. It didn’t upstage the Queen’s double-act with James Bond, though.

As the Sex Pistols’ rebellion faded into the warm haze of nostalgia, the problem for others was that there was nowhere much further to go, short of summoning up the spirits of Oliver Cromwell, Madame Guillotine and Yakov Yurovsky. And there was no call for that.

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In any case, republicanism had rather lost its forbidden allure. This was apparent even before the martyrdom of Diana in 1997. Five years earlier, Alastair Campbell, then the political editor of the Daily Mirror, denounced the royal family as “the apex of a class system that exposes John Major’s ‘classless society’ for the slogan that it is,” and called for Betty Boothroyd, the Speaker of the House of Commons, to be elevated to the monarchy: “Queen Betty has a rather truer ring than Queen Diana.”

The same year, Sue Townsend’s novel The Queen and I was premised on the election of a republican government, leading the royal family to be rehoused on a rundown council estate. The Queen and Princess Anne are sufficiently practical to adapt to their changed circumstances; Prince Philip not so much. Less seriously, there were books such as Stephen Haseler’s The End of the House of Windsor and A.N. Wilson’s The Fall of the House of Windsor (both 1993).

And then in 1994, the Independent on Sunday became the first mainstream paper to declare itself in favour of the abolition of the monarchy. We needed an elected president, the paper declared, and it asked its readers who that should be. Again, Betty Boothroyd won support, coming in second, ahead of Jarvis Cocker, the singer with Pulp, but behind the people’s choice, Tony Benn. (The highest ranked royal was Princess Anne in eighth place, just behind Richard Branson.)

In such a climate, it was hard to make a mark, though many continued to try. In his first book, God Save the Queen? (2002), Johann Hari, then writing for the New Statesman condemned the Queen’s “cruel neglect of her children”, and said the abolition of the monarchy was necessary “for the mental health of those involved”. The book helped launch Hari on a career that saw him win the Orwell Prize for political journalism (even if that was subsequently withdrawn), but it was incapable of generating the same notoriety as Lord Altrincham or the Sex Pistols had managed.

And maybe it was all grist to the mill. The monarchy has survived the centuries by adapting to new social demands. Its function, as Malcolm Muggeridge pointed out, was as “a useful unifying element in a society full of actual and potential discord”. And if society wanted a pantomime villain or two to express republican views, then that requirement could also be accommodated. “God save history,” sang Johnny Rotten. “God save your mad parade.” And then he too took his place on the periphery of that mad parade, forever associated with the institution he so disparaged. In his respectful tweet to mark the passing of Elizabeth, he included the picture of her that had been used to promote “God Save the Queen”. This time, there was no safety-pin.

Their story was one of the first I learned when I was getting interested in the history of pop music because the simplified, mythologised version was so easy to grasp. Britain was grotty, violent and boring. Everyone was listening to prog-rock keyboard solos. And then punk happened and everything changed! Was it true? Not entirely, but what a narrative!

For Craig Pearce and Danny Boyle, writer and director of the new Disney+ series Pistol, the compressed timeline cuts both ways. It helps in terms of dramatic unity: no long slog to the top, no slow decline. It hurts because the crucial events are so well-known. The convergence of a mediocre rock band called the Strand, manager Malcolm McLaren and the snot-haired outcast who became Johnny Rotten. “Anarchy in the UK”. The accidental scandal of the Bill Grundy show. The calculated scandal of “God Save the Queen” and the Silver Jubilee boat trip. The arrival of Sid Vicious. The record labels who decided they were too hot to handle before a young Richard Branson took a punt on Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols. Their final implosion in San Francisco: “Ever get the feeling you’ve been cheated?” The hideous coda of Sid and Nancy. What more is there to say? What mysteries to reveal? It all happened too fast.

The release of Pistol in time for the Jubilee, alongside a somewhat tawdry reissue of “God Save the Queen”, reaffirms the peculiar connection between the Sex Pistols and the Queen: two radically different visions of England, both now united by nostalgia. Boyle, who managed to squeeze both of them into the opening ceremony of the London Olympics, brings his usual wit and velocity to the show — the concert scenes are thrilling — but the actors are far too attractive and say implausibly tidy things like “We’re outlaws and tonight we’re going to change the world” and “No one gives a shit about us so we don’t give a shit about no one else”. Pearce, who has written five screenplays for Baz Luhrmann, makes this too much of a jolly showbiz caper and even the tragedy is sentimentalised. Pistol entertains but it doesn’t disturb.

Pistol does at least recognise that the Sex Pistols were an unstable compound from day one because the key players were not great friends and they had very different missions. Guitarist Steve Jones, drummer Paul Cook and original bassist Glen Matlock wanted to make noisy rock’n’roll. “From that day on, it was different,” Jones later complained about the Bill Grundy furore. “Before then, it was just music; the next day, it was the media.”

But to Malcolm McLaren, who advertised that the Pistols were more incompetent players than they really were, it was never just about the music. It was a Situationist art project that would help him flog T-shirts and give him a reputation as a devilish impresario. “The only rule I had was that if it didn’t annoy anyone and create problems, it wasn’t worth doing,” he explained.

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This was easy to say if you weren’t on the frontline. The combined impact of Grundy and “God Save the Queen” made life very difficult for the band — tabloid fury, cancelled gigs, physical assaults, vilification on a breathtaking scale — but to McLaren, who saw them as components in a chaos engine rather than vulnerable young men, it was all fabulous publicity. In his eyes the Sex Pistols were nothing if they weren’t a media event. The writer Fred Vermorel astutely describes the Sex Pistols as “a masterpiece made not of paint and canvas but of headlines and scandal, scams and factoids, rumour and fashion, slogans, fantasies and images and (I almost forgot) songs”.

As for Matlock’s replacement Sid Vicious, effectively a feral child, he was the true embodiment of the famous line that McLaren fed to Jones: “Actually we’re not into music. We’re into chaos.” And Johnny Rotten, with his gargoyle stare and indelible sneer, wanted to express his fathomless contempt with everyone and everything, himself included. So it was entirely appropriate that the band would self-immolate, on the stage of San Francisco’s Winterland theatre, in a hateful mess with Rotten snarling “no fun” over and over again. They were a timebomb all along.

If the participants could not agree on what the Sex Pistols were, then nor can their fans. To Noel Gallagher, who borrowed their exhilarating hostility and tsunami of guitars on Oasis’s Definitely Maybe, Never Mind the Bollocks is “a fucking laugh”. But to the Manic Street Preachers, whose misanthropic masterpiece The Holy Bible also came out in 1994, the vital ingredient was the annihilating disgust of “Bodies” and “Holidays in the Sun”.

Whereas the Clash were sociable humanists, the Pistols were so thoroughly alienated that their politics landed somewhere truly unnerving, beyond Left and Right. The Sun wasn’t wrong to compare them to the marauding Droogs in A Clockwork Orange. In his review of the album, the critic Robert Christgau was both blown away and freaked out: “The only real question is how many American kids might feel the way Rotten does, and where he and they will go next. I wonder — but I also worry.”

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You can assess the Sex Pistols in historical terms, as the greatest rock catalyst since Bob Dylan and the Beatles. The Damned’s “New Rose” may have been the first punk rock single but it was the Sex Pistols who licensed people to think: “I could do that.” Straight away, there were bands like the Clash and Joy Division who formed or reinvented themselves as a direct result of seeing them play. “They were terrible,” Joy Division’s Bernard Sumner once said. “I thought they were great. I wanted to get up and be terrible too.” His bandmate Peter Hook said: “I wanted to tell the world to fuck off, just like Johnny Rotten.” Down the years, the example of the Sex Pistols has inspired the Specials and Depeche Mode; U2 and Simple Minds; the Smiths and the Fall; Nirvana and Green Day; the Prodigy and Eminem; Trainspotting and Natural Born Killers. The Sex Pistols were the birth of something new and immense. After them came the flood.

Yet if you think about what the Sex Pistols actually were rather than what they initiated, you’re struck by their deathward trajectory — the denial and negation crystallised in Rotten’s cry of “No future!” Public Enemy’s Chuck D called them “art kamikazes” and that spirit of self-destruction, of being consumed by the fire you started, comes from Rotten alone. The music was thrilling and immediate but trying to get to the bottom of what Rotten was doing can lead you to some very strange places.

In Lipstick Traces, Greil Marcus uses a coincidence of names as an excuse to write a long digression about the murderous millenarian cult leader John of Leiden, who subjected Münster to a reign of terror before being tortured to death in 1536. It should be an absurd stretch but it doesn’t feel like one. Disfiguring every syllable he sang, Rotten had the energy of an apocalyptic preacher, unleashing a power that frightened him as well as the listener. He once said he was scared to approach the microphone because he was shocked by how he sounded. Even though he’s associated with the cultural revolution of 1976-77, he sometimes seemed like a creature from another time: a folk devil, a bug-eyed lord of misrule.

Johnny Rotten, a name invented and owned by McLaren, only lived for two-and-a-bit years. It was as John Lydon that he launched Public Image Ltd, the truest expression of his musical radicalism, advertised butter, appeared on I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here!, and so on. Lydon has repeatedly insisted that he was never an anarchist and has nothing against the Queen, and talks about the Sex Pistols with a weird blend of pride (in his own role) and contempt (for everyone else’s). Predictably, he waged a legal battle with his former bandmates in an attempt to stop Pistol using their music, but he lost. Before it had even been made, he called the series “the most disrespectful shit I’ve ever had to endure”, which is a strong claim from someone who was once knifed because of a pop song.

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Lydon’s support for Brexit and Donald Trump has disappointed many fans but I don’t think that it’s inconsistent with his original mission to demolish the status quo. Populism is much better at knocking things down than building something better. As the Atlantic’s James Parker argued in 2016, Trump “co-created a space in American politics that is uniquely transgressive, volatile, carnivalesque, and (from a certain angle) punk rock”. In his memoir, Fred Vermorel, allegedly quoting Baudrillard, writes about “the ecstasy of making things worse”. Perhaps Rotten then, and Lydon now, would counter that things couldn’t get any worse, but however much we talk about punk in terms of community and DIY creativity, it was also about the glee of smashing things to pieces. Heath Ledger understood this perfectly when he partly based his version of the Joker on Rotten: some people just want to watch the world burn.

I doubt you could put on screen the writhing confusion and alien menace of Johnny Rotten in a way that was both true and palatable to a Disney+ audience. Lipstick Traces: The Movie? I don’t think so. A Malcolm McLaren version of the Sex Pistols story would have to be a postmodern comedy in the spirit of 24 Hour Party People. Pistol, meanwhile, is based on Steve Jones’s memoir Lonely Boy, so what we get is an energetic, well-made biopic of a rock band. Fair enough, but being a rock band was far from the most interesting thing about the Sex Pistols.