Buzzcocks - The Complete History. Tony McGartland
of the greatest groups have thrived on internal tension, but Buzzcocks never looked more dangerous than when they were in a tight, harmonious unit.
In retrospect, this didn’t happen until the recording of their first album, Another Music in a Different Kitchen in 1977. Around then, the band stabilised into the classic line-up we recognise today: Pete Shelley (vocals), Steve Diggle (guitar), Steve Garvey (bass) and John Maher (drums). Before that, two major figures had passed through their ranks – Howard Devoto (later of Magazine) and Garth Davies – but, although their stints with the group were mercurial and exciting, they couldn’t match the thrill and competence of the legendary 1978 setup. It was during this period that the band produced their best material, which capitalised on the early youth-club bluster of classics such as ‘Orgasm Addict’, ‘Oh Shit!’ and ‘What Do I Get?’ and catapulted the group into the public eye, perfectly capturing the ringing anthemic barrage of their live sets.
Pete Shelley’s camp, coquettish stage persona and dry Mancunian drawl gilded the Buzzcocks’ songs with the same magical veneer that Johnny Rotten’s snarl added to the Pistols or Joey to the Ramones. Listening to Shelley’s hiccupping about ‘butcher’s assistants and bell-hops, winos and heads of state’ was always like watching a beautiful pop-art painting materialising before your eyes – sharp, life-affirming, funny – yet underneath there was hidden frustration.
By the time the group had released their second album, Love Bites, and scored more hits with the all-time classic ‘Ever Fallen in Love?’, ‘Promises’ and ‘Everybody’s Happy Now’, the ironic truth was beginning to reveal itself. Confined by the band’s simple rock setup, each member was itching to experiment with outside projects, which within months they had embarked upon.
Their third studio album, A Different Kind of Tension, may have been a cry for help, yet the inventiveness of the music it contained overshadowed the growing unease among its creators. ‘Paradise’ and ‘I Don’t Know What To Do With My Life’ were savagely invigorating songs, though, sadly, their effortless punk majesty wouldn’t be matched again. An aborted fourth album and record company troubles brought Buzzcocks to an abrupt halt in early 1981, leaving Shelley to spiral into the darkness of depression.
But the band’s split only heightened their reputation as one of the brashest and most melodic punk bands ever, and their clear and widespread influence made them look the most relevant punk band to what was happening in the eighties. So relevant, in fact, that they re-formed in 1989, and have since become a massive live draw and a recording force to deal with, judging by their superb 1992 studio album Trade Test Transmissions. Pete Shelley once talked of ‘nostalgia for an age yet to come’ – luckily, with Buzzcocks still alive and frothing, that era still exists in the distant future.
Long before Buzzcocks formed in 1976, there were no romantic pseudonyms or ultra-sharp punk-pop songs like ‘What Do I Get?’ and ‘Everybody’s Happy Nowadays’, neatly redefining the borders along which wit and fast guitars collided – all that was half a decade and an inspirational gig by the legendary Sex Pistols away. Instead, there was just a quartet of northern grammar-school boys, with very ordinary names like Peter McNeish, Howard Trafford, Steve Diggle and Garth Davies, who shared an interest in late-sixties American garage bands like the Velvet Underground and Stooges, and the wired, groundbreaking, homegrown sounds of Bolan, Bowie and, of course, the Beatles.
As with most of the other youngsters who made their name with the New Wave, their road to success was pitted with all kinds of embarrassing escapades, including the obligatory stints in dodgy sixth-form cover bands and earnest no-hoper rock outfits. As early as 1966, and one step ahead of everyone, an eleven-year-old Garth Davies from Tyldesley had ambitions of becoming a pop star. By 1972 he had joined his first band, Solid Gold. As he moved from rhythm guitar to bass guitar, his knowledge of music and ability to play meant he was in demand. For, by the following year, schoolfriend Peter McNeish had invited Garth around to his house and together they formed their first band, White Light.
In retrospect, Peter McNeish – soon to be known to the world as Pete Shelley – enjoyed a pre-punk history less cringeworthy than that of many of his contemporaries, but there are certain moments that are probably best forgotten. It’s hard to imagine that Shelley would want anyone to hear the home recordings of the 1973 teenage bluster of his rock group, who by now had changed the name of the band to Jets of Air. The same would also be true of Howard Trafford’s (later ‘Devoto’) piano playing with the fleeting Ernest Band.
But, without these teenage experiences, it’s unlikely that Shelley and Devoto would have been ready to realise their own punk vision after witnessing the bruising and chaotic onslaught of the Sex Pistols at two early 1976 gigs in London. Indeed, some of the Buzzcocks’ debut album material had already been road-tested by Jets of Air, who played slower but nonetheless recognisable versions of ‘Love You More’, ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Sixteen Again’. More curious still, Pete Shelley’s classic, electro, eighties, synth-pop solo track, ‘Homosapien’, dated from 1974.
Indeed, the mid-seventies music scene shaped the New Wave much more than was ever credited at the time. In the years since punk, a myth has prevailed that the period between 1970 and 1975 was artistically barren, yielding little else but the interminable wailing of ten-minute Led Zeppelin-style guitar solos and rambling rock operas. There’s an element of truth in that, but a trip to the reissue section of any record shop reveals a very different story.
True, punk was born out of a frustration with manufactured teen groups such as the Bay City Rollers, as well as with Mercury and RAK’s roster of ageing, consumer-friendly pop’n’roll outfits like Suzie Quatro, Mud, Showaddywaddy, the Rubettes and Smokie. Things weren’t too hot at the ‘serious’ end of rock, either, with the Who and Led Zeppelin losing their early majesty through years of chemical indulgence, and progressive rockers like Genesis, Mike Oldfield and the post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd abandoning themselves to pseudo-symphonic masturbatory hell. Stateside, too, the music biz seemed to be stranded, as cocaine-fuelled record company moguls fawned over pompous, self-indulgent album-oriented rock acts such as Grateful Dead and the dreaded Jefferson Starship.
In retrospect, these stultifying elements of the music scene were all symptoms of a much larger malaise – the much-talked-about seventies hangover from the heady days of sixties counterculture, when no one was worried about the price of too much free love and dodgy brown acid. This knowledge somehow made it all seem worse.
But the early seventies wasn’t all bad – far from it, in fact. As teenagers, Pete Shelley, Howard Devoto and Steve Diggle existed at a time when pop music was more varied and inspiring than it would be again for several years to come. Weaving in and out of the studied tedium of the tight-trousered end of rock were those two great Bohemians of Britpop, Marc Bolan and David Bowie, both of whom had survived the late sixties to make a string of original, glamorous and wonderfully idiosyncratic rock albums, blurring their sexual identity and glittering themselves up along the way. With Bolan, Bowie and their friends Roxy Music, Sweet and even Slade, rock’n’roll suddenly became theatre, and everyone waited for the next costume change with bated breath.
Equally dramatic was the early-seventies Kraut Rock scene, which centred on a collection of German avant-garde artists who crafted the kind of quirky, synthesised soundscapes later to influence Bowie’s Heroes and Low albums from 1976 and 1977 respectively. Groups like Can, Faust and Tangerine Dream – and to a lesser extent the solemn, monolithic industrialists Kraftwerk – revolutionised the role of the synthesiser, and made challenging, often discordant music that flew in the face of traditional rock structures. Kraftwerk took anti-rock notions a step further, using the synthesiser’s austere sounds to articulate a sense of coolness and detachment, hinting at emotionally stark future worlds. Evidently, Pete Shelley was a fan, as in 1974 he recorded various doomy electronic sounds in the front room of his home, which later appeared on his 1981 solo record Sky Yen. His first proper solo