Never mind the pseuds, the Sex Pistols' puerile graffiti is NOT art, says CHRISTOPHER HART, as their four-letter scribblings are preserved for the nation

Two historic houses in London are to be preserved for future generations with a Grade-II listing. For sure, in a city dominated by arrogant skyscrapers, Numbers 6 and 7 Denmark Street (just off the Charing Cross Road) are lovely and rare examples of late 17th-century architecture.

But what has got the chattering classes and gushing cliques of the arts establishment really excited is their connection with . . . the Sex Pistols.

Never mind the building’s baroque flourishes: it’s the fact that Johnny Rotten once scrawled crude cartoons and semi- literate obscenities on its 300-year-old walls that apparently makes these properties a national treasure. For the topsy-turvy values of our new cultural elite now mean that puerile graffiti is art.

Two historic houses in London, Denmark Street (just off the Charing Cross Road), are to be listed because of their links to the Sex Pistols

In the mid-Seventies, the Sex Pistols inhabited the squalid attic flat here, plotting how to become notorious and get filthy rich.

One day, the flat was redecorated and the walls repainted, which Johnny Rotten deemed ‘too posh’, so he set about ruining them again.

‘DEPRESSED MISERABLE TIRED ILL SICK BOOED & BORED,’ he scrawled, adding poisonous, badly drawn caricatures of the band’s manipulative, Svengali-like manager, Malcolm McLaren, and a naked Nancy Spungen, the drug-addict, part-time prostitute and ill-fated girlfriend of Sid Vicious. Rotten labelled her picture ‘Nancy Spunger’.

Later, Vicious would stab Spungen to death in a seedy hotel bedroom in New York while out of his tiny mind on heroin.

Johnny Rotten once scrawled crude cartoons and semi- literate obscenities (pictured) on the 300-year-old walls of 6 Denmark Street

Another piece of the ugly little graffiti of Denmark Street caricatures Sid Vicious as Ego Slosho — a sneering reference to the fact he was an alcoholic and drug addict, evidently determined to fulfil every boring cliche in the Rock Star Handbook, eventually to die of a heroin overdose at just 21.

The walls of Denmark Street are further festooned with four-letter words and even an incorrectly drawn swastika. You have to be really quite stupid not to be able to draw a swastika. Even Adolf Hitler, failed art student, could have managed that one.

Yet 40 years on, we are being sold punk rock as some kind of major artistic movement on a par with Impressionism.

A spokesperson for Historic England, which will look after the houses, explains: ‘Punk can teach us a lot in our modern lives, in terms of freedom of expression and not conforming . . . it is really important these things are understood and valued.’

This fatuous admiration goes all the way to the top of our cultural establishment, where those who ought to know better — and once upon a time would have done — are similarly lost in admiration for the ‘genius’ that was the Sex Pistols.

Pistols Sid Vicious with girlfriend Nancy Spungen (left) and Johnny Rotten (right) spent time in Denmark Street

Here, for example, is the view of Heritage Secretary and Conservative MP David Evennett, on the Department of Culture, Media and Sport’s decision to preserve this hallowed site: ‘As we celebrate 40 years of punk, I’m delighted to be granting further protection to these buildings, which acted as a home and studio to the Sex Pistols.’

One can’t help wondering how portly, besuited Evennett will be celebrating ‘40 years of punk’ this year. Pogo-ing like a punk rock fan into the House of Commons?

The fact is, there are few things in life more toe-curlingly embarrassing than middle-aged politicians trying to cosy up to rock stars.

That photograph of a grinning Tony Blair shaking hands with Oasis’s Noel Gallagher in one of the chandeliered state-rooms of 10 Downing Street can still — almost 20 years later — bring some of us out in a cold sweat.

How 6 Denmark Street looks in 2016, 40 years after the 1970s punk legends gave it the notoriety that will now see it listed

The PM wears the winsome, besotted smile of a 14-year-old girl meeting the Bay City Rollers circa 1974.

And, of course, you can always find some twittish academic to lend his support — or, in this case, two for the price of one.

Dr Paul Graves-Brown, of University College, London, and Dr Paul Schofield, of the University of York, have joined forces to acclaim the Sex Pistols’ graffiti as more important — and I’m not making this up, I swear — than the tomb of the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun.

Dressed in clothes decorated with razor blades, lavatory chains and spiked dog collars, the Sex Pistols produced songs that were little more than spittle-flecked rants of resentment

According to these two ‘experts’, some people thought the discovery of lost Beatles recordings at the BBC more important than King Tut, but the two university academics stated that ‘the Sex Pistols’ graffiti in Denmark Street surely ranks alongside this and — to our minds — usurps it. The fact that the graffiti could be considered rude, offensive and uncomfortable merely enhances their status and significance’.

They go on to add, in impeccable academic jargon: ‘Deconstruction of the graffiti . . . presents a layering of time and changing relations . . . this very archaeological record offers something visceral and immediate and generates unique insight.’

Well, that’s one way to describe swastikas and four-letter words.

All of which makes you wonder — are these cultural commissars and state-salaried guardians of our national heritage quite up to the job? Are they talking about the same Sex Pistols that many of us actually remember?

That is, the Sex Pistols who burst upon an unsuspecting world back in the mid-Seventies, in a blizzard of sputum and vomit? A band who made up for their musical inadequacies with a snarling hatred of their audience, England, the Queen, their manager and, above all, each other?

Dressed in clothes decorated with razor blades, lavatory chains and spiked dog collars, they produced songs that were little more than spittle-flecked rants of resentment.

‘All we’re trying to do is destroy everything,’ explained Rotten, which you might think sounds like the opposite of culture and heritage.

Soon they and their dubious entourage became notorious, then famous, then rich: just as rich as the ageing rock stars whom they professed to despise. Johnny Rotten/John Lydon is now worth some £15 million, and is married to a German publishing heiress, while another key player in the sordid business was Vivienne Westwood — her designs dressed the band and helped them carve out their identity.

Westwood (who had a love-hate affair with McClaren), has also done rather well out of rebelling against ‘traditional values’.

Now a Dame of the British Empire worth some £180 million, she has also shaved her head ‘to highlight the dangers of climate change’ and attacked consumerism.

Confusingly, Dame Vivienne has also opened a new, three-storey flagship store in that glitzy capital of consumerism, Manhattan.

Back in the Seventies, it was Westwood who pressed on Sid Vicious a book about the psychopathic Charles Manson, whose followers committed such atrocious murders at his behest. Allegedly, this was to bring out his more violent side and thus garner more welcome publicity.

Perhaps it worked. Vicious was an aggressive yob who could hardly play his instrument, but he did smash a fan over the head with it on one occasion, while uttering the exquisitely witty words: ‘Oh dear, I’ve dropped my guitar.’

On other memorable occasions, he spat blood in a female fan’s face, assaulted a journalist with a bicycle chain, and when he threw and smashed a beer glass, he blinded a girl in one eye. This is the artistic genius who is now among our most revered cultural icons, his legacy protected by our government on the advice of Historic England.

But perhaps our cultural elite’s latest foray into the gutter with their Grade-II listing of the Sex Pistols’ hovel, shouldn’t be surprising. Not in a culture like ours, so disdainful of its past, so cut off from all it once revered, so value-free and cynical and begrimed.

No wonder our enemies such as ISIS regard us as terminally decadent.