When I was six, Dad came back from London with a Sex Pistols record under his arm. He slotted it on the player and our living room reverberated with this angry, contemptuous sound. I remember sitting on the floor with an almost spiritual sense of a switch flicking inside me. That day, punk had found me.

At eight, I went into a record shop with my own money and came out with Black Flag’s Damaged. The cover was threatening. The music was terrifying. I played that record until the grooves had worn out.

By twelve, I was already putting the school paper together with fierce pride over the choice of the headlines and the sequencing of each story as though it was as monumental as the fall of the Berlin Wall. At home, the soundtrack only grew. On family car holidays, reggae rhythms from Bob Marley bled into the Ska sound of Dutch band Doe Maar. Reggae and Punk, sharing a backseat without any fuss or bother.

Then I heard the Business. The raw immediacy of Streetpunk and Oi grabbed me like nothing else-no frills, working-class, don't give a damn. I was permanently converted. At fourteen, I finally found myself lost in the sweaty, shoulder-to-shoulder pandemonium of my first real live gig. It was a punk gig, naturally. I had all the confirmation I needed: the noise, the crowd, the attitude-this was where I belonged.

Two years ago I began to write. There just weren't enough people writing about Oi and the music which had shaped me really did seem like it deserved more than oblivion. Thus began a chronicle of records, bands and nights that were still vibrating in my head.

From that seven-year-old, open-mouthed to the sneering sound of the Pistols to the twenty-something me fanning the flames with a blog online, the thread has never snapped. Oi found me young. I never gave it back.