May 1977. The Sex Pistols' God Save The Queen reached number 2 in the charts, Liverpool were crowned league champions for the second successive season and Tony Parsons and Julie Burchill were still considered hip young gun-slingers.
Fast forward three decades or so and Johnny Rotten is doing ads for Country Life butter, the last time Liverpool won successive titles Steven Gerrard was barely out of nappies, Parsons pens novels about family life and Burchill was, until relatively recently, a broadsheet columnist.
The world has moved on, you might say. But not so far that anyone looking to endow a product with instant attitude doesn't still use punk as a touchstone. And so it is with the latest "irreverent, attitudinal, edgy" magazine, Football Punk, due to hit the news-stand this week.
"In true punk tradition," begins Richard Lenton's ed's letter in the Football Punk sampler. Really?
At 36, I'm a little too young to remember the "punk wars" - by all accounts a bit like the Napoleonic wars only snottier - but I'm pretty sure whatever ideology the Bromley contingent et al believed they were fighting for, it didn't involve Danielle Bux getting her kit off...again.
All that said, at first glance, the launch seems to make sense for publisher JF Media - part-owned by former footballer Phil Babb and already in the sports magazine sector with recently relaunched sister title Golf Punk International.
However, a quick check on the numbers and one struggles to find the logic. Last year, Golf Punk had an ABC of 14,928, Jan-Dec, with just less than 10,000 copies being full-price news-stand sales. At that level, especially in the current climate, you can't imagine it's generating an overly lucrative page yield.
A healthy cross-sell also looks unlikely. Out of about 30 pages of ads in the latest 184-page issue of Golf Punk, including classifieds, just five were not specifically golf-related. And of those, only the single page for sportswear brand Fila would seem an obvious fit for a football spin-off.
With an ABC of 105,531, Four Four Two shows if you get the product right, there is an appetite for a monthly football glossy, despite the wider media, from tabloids to dedicated radio stations, being awash with football coverage.
And if just a tiny proportion of the billions generated by the Premier League gets used to help support creative, independent publishing, that has to be a good thing.
But, while applauding their endeavour, to launch a monthly sports mag, with the ad market in possibly its worst slump ever, in the bizarre words of Steve McClaren, they are "not jusht underdogsh, but mashive underdogsh".
