Pete Shelley tribute
Pitchfork, December 8 2028
by Simon Reynolds
The first and only time I saw Buzzcocks play live was in 2012, at the Incubate festival in Holland. They seemed an incongruous choice for a festival otherwise dedicated to experimentalism and dark cutting-edge fare. Although I love the band’s late-1970s output, I never would have actively sought out their live incarnation as a pop-punk legacy act; it was exactly the sort of nostalgia-appealing operation that would usually earn my stern disapproval. It was mild curiosity, really, that drew me into the big hall—only to be stunned by the power and glory of the noise wrought by the worse-for-wear-looking survivors on the stage.
Classic after classic smashed
into the crowd’s collective face like surf. I found myself doing something
embarrassingly close to a pogo. It was wonderful, every bit of it—even a
strange new mid-section to “Harmony In My Head” that involved Steve Diggle
delivering a kind of quasi-insurrectionary rap. This appeared to bemuse Pete
Shelley as much as the audience and prompted him to gasp into the mic, “What
the fuck was that?”. I had turned up expecting something rote and stale;
instead I was jolted alive.
Whenever I listen to Buzzcocks’
music, what always strikes me is how modern it still sounds. But that is
actually how it works with true innovation. No matter how much time passes—decades
during which a breakthrough is assimilated and worn out by repetition, whether
by others or by the artist repeating themselves—something of that initial shock
of the new rings out and cuts through. And if you think about it, nearly
everything handed down to us as “classic” was, in its own time, a break with
tradition.
Buzzcocks severed ties with the
blues-rooted rock of the early ’70s. No Chuck Berry chug for them: instead,
Shelley cited Can’s Michael Karoli as his favorite guitarist and said that his
idea of a great solo was John Lennon’s abstract noise eruptions on Yoko Ono’s
“Why.” The name Buzzcocks could almost be onomatopoeia for the noise made by
Shelley and rhythm guitarist Diggle: a serrated surge, at once coarse and
sleek, with a hint of kinky mischief. Shelley and the band’s original singer
Howard Devoto found that name from the chance conjunction of words in a
magazine headline about the buzz-worthy TV show “Rock Follies,” rock-biz satire
featuring a tough-girl singer who cheekily addresses everyone as “cock.”
Although they were in the
original core cluster of groups that invented UK punk, Buzzcocks would always
be an anomaly within that movement—misfits among the misfits. There had never
been words, a voice, a personality, like this in rock before. Shelley sang love
songs when every other major punk vocalist rejected them as trivial next to
political themes, or—if they did deal with desire and heartbreak—laced the
words with spite and hostility. The aggression in Buzzcocks was all in the
sound; the animating spirit was sensitive, open-hearted, vulnerable. There’s a lovely clip of Shelley circulating on the internet, interviewed by a TV
documentary crew in 1977 when punk gigs in Britain were getting banned by local
councils and picketed by hordes of outraged citizenry. Twinkling and grinning
adorably, the singer is incredulous at the idea that he could be deemed “vile
and obscene.”
When punk evolved into post-punk,
Buzzcocks didn’t fit there either. Although Shelley was well-read and
philosophically searching, and although the group’s graphic presentation was
arty and stark, their tunes and riffs went straight for your pleasure centers;
the words were direct, colloquial, accessible to all. Nor did Buzzcocks have
much truck with the militancy or didacticism of the post-punk era. The band’s
politics were personal, verging on private—to do with radical honesty, the
struggle to be an individual, to disentangle oneself from games and masks and
role-play.
“I think people need a new way of
living—inside themselves,” Shelley offered gently, when asked about the idea of
a political movement by TV interviewer Tony Wilson. People generally assume
that Peter McNeish renamed himself Shelley after the Romantic poet, but in that
same TV mini-doc about Buzzcocks, Wilson says that Shelley was the name that
his parents would have given Peter if he’d been a girl.
That invocation of the she that
he might have been connects to a genuine innovation that Shelley introduced to
rock and that reflected his fluid sexuality: the deliberate use of gender
non-specific pronouns in love songs, something that would hugely influence
later lyricists like Morrissey. "There isn't any implied
gender in our songs now because we think it's boring singing about one thing
when it could apply to both sexes,” Shelley told the music paper Sounds
in 1977. “Our songs our bisexual."
This elasticity of gender and
sexual attraction was one aspect of Shelley’s desire to invent a new kind of
love song. In a 1978 interview with NME, he described himself as “a
modern romantic… trying to find out what modern romance is.. I’m
trying to find something new… All the old kinds of romance are self-destructive
because they don’t take account of realities.” On the Buzzcocks’ debut album, Another
Music From A Different Kitchen, “Fiction Romance” was about the gap between
the entrancing dreams propagated by movies and magazines and the aching mess of
real-life desire: “I love this love story/That never seems to happen in my
life.”
Shelley’s solution was a radical mundanity, using pained humor to sketch scenarios of humiliation, inadequacy and shortfall, coupled with melody that promised resolution or transcendence. Again, this tension between romance and reality points ahead to groups like Orange Juice and the Smiths. In the Buzzcocks’ case, the delicate balancing act between beauty and bathos was never more (im)perfect than on the group’s second and third singles: the perpetual unfulfillment of “What Do I Get?” (the answer: sleepless nights in an empty bed), the amorous asymmetry of “I Don’t Mind” (“this pathetic clown’’ll keep hangin’ around, that’s if you don’t mind”).
Although “Ever Fallen In Love
(With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)” continues the theme and is a fan favorite as
well as Buzzcocks’s biggest UK chart hit, this triptych of anti-romantic love
songs is really completed by “You Say You Don’t Love Me.” The aim here is
clarity achieved through a kind of positive disillusionment, serene acceptance
of things as they are: “I don’t want to live in a dream, I want something real…
Though I’ve got this special feeling, I’d be wrong to call it love/For the word
entails a few things that I would be well rid of.” In interviews, Shelley
talked of his new approach: starting out as friends and hoping romance would
grow, rather than falling head over heels and then trying to turn that
idealized half-figment of a person into a friend and companion.
In the punk and new wave era,
people who would never have previously been considered to be pop star
material—on account of their looks or their vocal inadequacies—became household
names. Part of the shock of Buzzcocks was the sheer ordinariness of Pete Shelley
materializing in the glitzy TV context of “Top of the Pops.” With his open-neck
button-shirts and slightly shaggy hair, he looked like neither a punk nor a pop
star, but more like an office clerk on his lunch break. And he sang like one
too.
Shelley might never have become
the band’s lead singer and lyricist if Howard Devoto had stayed in Buzzcocks.
Like Bernard Sumner following the death of Ian Curtis, Shelley took on the
frontman role because he and the other members of the band figured it would be
easier for an insider to take over singing duties rather than accommodate a new
person who might have his own ideas.
But Shelley would have already
been a historically significant figure in British punk even if he’d never sung
a single tune or written a line of lyric. It was he and Devoto who arranged for
the Sex Pistols to play their debut Manchester gig at the Lesser Free Trade
Hall on June 4 1976: a much-mythologized event said to have seeded the city’s
entire punk scene, sparking the careers of Joy Division, the Fall, and
Morrissey.
It was also Shelley who persuaded
his dad to take out a loan for 250 pounds, the decisive investment in the
recording and pressing of Buzzcocks’ Spiral Scratch EP, which the band
and manager Richard Boon put out on their own New Hormones label. Released in
February 1977, Spiral Scratch would be the beacon that mobilized the DIY
hordes of punk and post-punk Britain and beyond, inspiring outfits like
Desperate Bicycles, Scritti Politti, and Swell Maps to demystify and democratize
the means of musical production. Do-it-yourself and release-it-yourself was
seen as a righteous war waged against the apathy and ennui so acutely
anatomized by Devoto in his lyrics for “Boredom,” Spiral Scratch’s
killer track.
By the time of the EP’s release,
though, Devoto was bored of punk itself and left the band, taking with him an
epic guitar riff generously gifted him by Shelley that would eventually serve
as the hook of “Shot By Both Sides,” the debut single of his new group
Magazine. Shelley and Buzzcocks, meanwhile, decided that persevering on their
own regional independent label was not viable and they signed with the major
United Artists. In swift succession, over just two compressed and hectic years,
there followed the immaculate debut album Another Music in A Different
Kitchen and its uneven but endearing follow-up Love Bites (both
released in 1978), then the underrated third album A Different Kind of
Tension the following year. The last of these was overlooked in its own
time, as the rapidly evolving UK scene left Buzzcocks behind.
There was also a string of eight
perfect singles, starting with “Orgasm Addict” (a hilarious masturbation anthem
that was, in fact, construable as “vile and obscene”). Together these made up Singles
Going Steady, the greatest “greatest hits” LP this side of the Supremes,
even if most of the inclusions had barely been hits. I vividly remember the
disbelief, aged 16, when the gorgeous melodic swirl of “Everybody’s Happy
Nowadays” and the glittering chimes of “Harmony In My Head” both failed to
pierce the Top 20.
In punk-pop perfection terms,
Buzzcocks were rivalled only by the Undertones and there was a feeling, albeit
a minority viewpoint, that they were the era’s Beatles, or should have been.
Each single deserved to go straight in at Number One. But there was more to
Shelley than power pop, as was revealed on the second side of Singles Going
Steady, dedicated to the group’s B-sides. These grew steadily less
straightforward, culminating in “Why Can’t I Touch It,” nearly seven
minutes of loping almost-funk and radically stereo-separated guitar-slashes,
and “Something’s Gone Wrong Again,” which resembles suspended-animation
Stooges, glistening with a coat of frost. The entire second side of A
Different Kind of Tension was a Shelley mini-concept album, permeated with
existential doubts and askew with a disassociated feeling influenced by LSD.
And 1980’s “Are Everything,” one of the first-phase Buzzcocks’ last singles,
was even more psychedelic: Shelley took acid for every stage of the process,
from recording to mixing, hoping for the rush of revelation to overcome him.
But it wasn’t a case of Buzzcocks
getting weirder as Shelley expanded his horizons: he’d always had an
experimental streak. A few years before punk, Shelley recorded several
albums worth of abstract electronic music and some of this 1974 material saw
belated release in 1980 as the album Sky Yen. Another 1980 side project
was The Tiller Boys, in which Shelley partnered with a Manchester teenager
called Eric Random to record the clangorous Neu!-like stampede “Big Noise From
the Jungle”, which became a favorite on John Peel’s BBC radio show. Both Sky
Yen and “Big Noise” bore a relationship to a pair of “theoretical groups”
Shelley had conceptualized in the years before Buzzcocks: a heavy,
hypnotic Krautrock-inspired project called Smash and an electronic entity known
as Sky. Unlike Smash, Sky actually “became real… but consisted solely of
me,” Shelley recalled to Trouser
Press in 1983. Made at home with hand-built oscillators and cheap-and-nasty
organs, Sky’s squalls of abstract electronic noise couldn’t have been further
from the prim precision and candied catchiness of “Ever Fallen In Love” .
Any Buzzcocks fans who splashed out for Shelley’s solo album were likely
mystified.
When Shelley and Devoto first met
it was actually through the Electronic Music Society at the Bolton Institute of
Technology in Greater Manchester, where they both studied: Devoto was looking
for someone to soundtrack a film he was making. “Peter was an electronics
engineer and he was into computers even at that stage,” Devoto told me in 2003.
With this deep and long-established interest in electronic music and
technology, it’s hardly surprising that Shelley was quick to notice the
potential of the affordable synths and drum machines that became available in
the last few years of the ’70s.
After the band split up exhausted
in 1980, Shelley started working on a solo album with Martin Rushent, the
producer who had crucially shaped the Buzzcocks’ raw-but-glossy sound on
record. The result was the pioneering synth-pop single “Homosapien,” yet another
in the long line of Shelley should-have-been-a-smash songs (although this time
the problem was a BBC ban, on account of its impishly suggestive homo-erotic
lyric), and a 1981 album of the same title that blended synths and drum
machines with electric guitars. Another parallel universe / alternate history
scenario tantalizes here: a world where Shelley pipped the Human League to the
post (they also worked with Rushent, to massive success) or became a kind of
one-man Pet Shop Boys. You could even imagine a Buzzcocks that didn’t split but
embraced electronics, gradually becoming a New Order-like force.
Instead, after a couple more
unsuccessful electro-pop solo records, Shelley joined with the other
ex-Buzzcocks to reform the group along their classic lines. They released their
fourth album Trade Test Transmissions in 1993, the first in a series of
half-a-dozen albums that were solid but never quite ignited the old spark. In
1994, at fanboy Kurt Cobain’s invitation, they toured with Nirvana, a preview
of the next 20 or so years of sustained live work.
In the days following Cobain’s
suicide in April 1994, Shelley—an early adopter of the internet—could be found
on a bulletin board of the now-defunct Compuserve commiserating with fans and
sharing his very recent memories of hanging out with Kurt. He cycled between
self-reproach for not being able to help the troubled singer and deliberately
irreverent comments intended to deflate overly pious laments for the fallen
rock savior—attitudes he clearly felt missed the point of punk and of Cobain
himself.
Shelley’s own aim was to be
exactly the same size as life, and somehow put that across onstage or on
record, despite the inherent artifice of being a performer. That was his
interpretation of what punk represented—the artist as unheroic hero, on the
same level as the fans. Approachable, unassuming, self-deprecating, Shelley
lived out that ideal until the end.
