They were great and they were a great gateway too, to Can and other music. I always come back to them, to their deceptive simplicity, the brilliance of it all, the thrill. I stuck with them when people stopped going to their shows, and in a way they became more accessible to a smaller audience. I loved them so much, I even considered trying to go out with this girl – probably totally unsuitable for me in every way other than she had a Love Bites poster on her wall. I was fascinated by him, how could he write so many amazing songs, sing and play them the way he did and make it look so easy. Pete Shelley, the modest magician frontperson, became a sort of hero to me. In the shock of the times, Buzzcocks became my thing: their already amazing catalogue of songs, the way their records looked, their muted styles, their everything. Photograph: Martyn Goodacre/Getty ImagesĪt 15 or 16 I was ready for the change that punk was bringing, ready to move on for a while from my Beatles, Bolan love and get into something a little more current. (l-r) Katrina Mitchell, Aggi Wright and Stephen McRobbie. So many Buzzcocks songs are engraved on my heart, and I am so happy I knew Pete a little bit and that his songs live on and on. In my band the Hangovers, we used to play a version of Why Can’t I Touch It – performing it used to make me feel like I was outside of my body. We decided that night that Pete and Simon would come and sing on my song, Love a Loser, which they did, and Pete’s voice is particularly inimitable.
I, unlike in my song We Had a Really Smashing Time, kept my clothes on. Pete and Simon Fisher Turner danced naked, happily and euphorically on his rooftop, causing rather a commotion. We went to the house of the Royal College of Art’s head of film production he lived in the Albany, the rather exclusive and exotic apartments in Piccadilly. The guy nearly jumped out of his skin, but Pete was so sweet and charming. I still have this – it always makes me smile and remember the night we went to a bar where Pete joined in with the singing, standing in front of a lonely, concentrating musician playing Ever Fallen in Love. We had some drunken scrapes, and Pete wrote a dedication to me on the inner sole of his shoe, the poet that he was, when he decided we were deep, drunken soulmates. Gina Birch: ‘Pete decided we were deep, drunken soulmates’ Photograph: Shirley O'Loughlin I probably would not be where I am now without Pete Shelley. He never made you feel like you were imposing. Without the Buzzcocks tour that Joy Division did, I don’t think any of us would have given up our day jobs. He was always instrumental in making sure that our courses ran together. It was him that gave us the gig with Stiff Kittens supporting the Buzzcocks that started us off. Every time we phoned him, God bless him, he’d say, “Come and meet us and talk.” He was very generous. He’d only been in one a month longer than us, yet he was our mentor. Me and Barney took to phoning Pete up to talk about our group. We didn’t know that Pete Shelley and Howard had put the Sex Pistols on it was only when we came to the next Pistols gig, when the Buzzcocks played, that we got talking to them.
GLEN MATLOCK POLITICS FREE
I went to see the Sex Pistols at the Lesser Free Trade Hall on 4 June 1976, and as the gig finished me and Barney decided to form a group. Peter Hook: ‘Shelley never made you feel like you were imposing’ Photograph: Mark Metcalfe/Getty Images He was dismissed at the time for just writing about love, but he wasn’t just writing about love. But there’s wonderful songs like I Need, which is all about the difference between wanting and needing – the capitalist perplex! He used love songs to talk about all sorts of things: the nature of perception, the nature of implanted desire, the nature and the problems of love itself. I suppose my favourite song is Orgasm Addict, which is one of the wittiest songs ever about sex: so fast, so exciting, just perfect.
He was sly, witty, and that was a different way of getting your message across. And certainly all the Buzzcocks’ mannerisms, their approach – he wasn’t confrontational. Pete later said he was bisexual, but even before that he said he wrote to appeal to both genders. Sex and gender roles were an important part of that to me, and Buzzcocks were singing about male vulnerability at a time when not many people were doing that. ‘I was struck by the openness’ … (from left) Pete Shelley, Steve Diggle, Garth Smith.
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