Old punks regard stately home CD as pretty vacant

Punk's not dead – it's just having a nice cup of tea and a look round a stately home.

In an announcement which has left old Mohawks pogoing with bewilderment, it seems the spirit of '76 is alive and well and being preserved by the National Trust. An album produced by the heritage body – entitled Never Mind The Dovecotes – features 18 tracks culled from the heyday of British punk. Among the artists selected to represent the flowering of youth rebellion are The Sex Pistols, Sham 69, GBH and Slaughter and the Dogs. It is estimated that half a million of the Trust's members were aged between 16 and 25 in the late 1970s, when the British establishment was in uproar over the appearance of disaffected, bondage trouser-clad youths in the nation's new concrete shopping centres.

Now it hopes to cash in on the demographic shift by selling the album at its gift shops and online to fund conservation work on its historic homes and ancient landscapes. But there was dismay among those that were in the vanguard of the movement.

Jimmy Pursey, 56, frontman with Sham 69 – whose song "If the Kids are United" is included in the compilation – described it as "the most Tupperware bit of nonsense I have ever heard in my life".

He added: "We are so frightened of what we are looking at ahead of us that we are digging trenches in nostalgia. We are just standing our ground and not letting the future affect us." Also included on the album are X-Ray Spex, The Jam and Siouxsie and the Banshees.

Last year Pulp's Jarvis Cocker curated an album of natural sounds for the Trust taken from its historic buildings and landscapes.