Buzzcocks
They can do that
Published by Under The Radar

“We never actually saw him,” Steve Diggle says, laughing. “He actually wasn’t there when we was playin’. The desk was empty.” The elusive figure is late-night talk show host Craig Kilborn, who, the previous day, “hosted” the Buzzcocks on American TV for the first time in the band’s 26-year history. “Amazing, isn’t it?” the guitarist marvels. “Nobody’d asked us. There was a few offers of shows a few years back, but we couldn’t always make it or we was lined up for some show and then it didn’t happen or something like that.”

Playing for an empty desk and some tourists wasn’t quite the same as playing to a paying L.A. audience that same night. “You know that TV audience,” says Diggle. “I think there was a few Buzzcocks fans there, ’cause they seemed to know what was goin’ on. The rest of them were those ones that, you know, when the guy says clap, you clap.” But these Mancunian vets aren’t doing scattered dates as part of a quickie reunion. The Buzzcocks are here to promote a new record, so Diggle’s not complaining about absentee hosts and mechanical applause. “It probably is a good bit of exposure for us. Since we first came here, there’s always been a good following, but it’s more like a cult thing everywhere. So to be on the main TV, it could get across to a lot of kids, couldn’t it? Like, you meet people along the way, they’ll go, ‘Buzzcocks, I’ve heard of them, but I don’t know any songs or whatever.’ Now we might sell a few albums.”

Released in March, their new self-entitled album has been well received. Critics seem to be saying that, in its overt punkness, it’s beating the current crop at its own game. You could call it a return to form, but that’s not entirely accurate. Buzzcocks is more of a return to a later, harder brand of punk that revels in its D.I.Y. And as such, it doesn’t reach the hooky heights of the band’s ’70s stuff. “We thought for this one we’d go back to basics,” is how Diggle explains it. “Make it a little bit tougher as well, turn up the guitars a bit more, make it more direct. Like the real early stuff, but a modern-day, now sort of thing.”

There’s a sense that the Buzzcocks have been keeping a finger on the musical pulse. Strange for a band that once tried to deliberately put people off. “We didn’t expect people to like it,” says singer-guitarist Pete Shelley of the band’s earliest recordings. “I mean, that was part of the fun, trying to come up with new ways to actually make it so that people wouldn’t like it.” Similarly, Diggle sums up the chasm between punk then and “punk” now: “We was making the most uncommercial music possible at the time.”

But times change, realities unfold, and innovation eludes even the best in the field. These days the Buzzcocks still make honest music; they’ve just given their surroundings an opposite role to play in the process. “It’s a bit like what outfit you’re gonna wear for a function six, nine months away and whether it’s gonna be sunny or not,” says Shelley. “Because it’s off in the future, you may get it wrong. But when we were doin’ this album, we thought in the intervening five years there’s been a lot of resurgence in guitar bands and things like that, so we thought, ‘We can do that.’”

As if there was any question, the Buzzcocks are demonstrating just that on their summer tour. On stage they spit and sweat their way through new material and most of the essential Singles Going Steady compilation, all the while appearing to thoroughly enjoy themselves. Diggle is a geezer who’s been gulping at the fountain of youth. Lunging, gobbing, and throwing his guitar around, he’s effortlessly punk. Shelley holds the center while youngster bassist Tony Barber, dressed for King’s Road circa 1977, hunches jack-legged, pouring machine-gun downstrokes into some pretty skillful playing. Mosh-pit elbows stamp their approval right between the ribs. Diggle dedicates “Autonomy” to Joe Strummer, who’d loved the song ever since he heard it on The Clash’s White Riot tour.

The Buzzcocks have dotted the radar over the past year or two. Last summer they played a punk festival in the Southern California desert called the Inland Invasion. Shelley was surprised at all the celebs flanking the stage. Diggle says it was good, if a bit surreal: “You tend to think this thing comes ’round to little clubs and stuff, like the CBGB’s. Suddenly you’re in the desert and all these punks come down. It was a good time, that billing. They always have different festivals in England, but it’s not always like a big punk festival like that -- you know, to have the Sex Pistols, The Damned, and ourselves on, and Blink-182 and The Offspring and that. It isn’t one of these festivals where somebody has a chart hit and then they put somebody else on because of record company muscle.” And he enjoyed seeing the Pistols for the first time in about 12 years.

Then there’s the car commercial. Some fans are surely pissed that “What Do I Get?” is now the soundtrack for an SUV, but I don’t know that Diggle thinks of it in such ideological terms. As he describes it, the music supervisor was a fan, saying it would be an honor to have the song in his commercial. Sounds like any whiff of image-making was freshened up with the right amount of artistic appreciation.

The Buzzcocks also appeared briefly in 24 Hour Party People, last year’s mockumentary skim over Manchester music of the late ’70s and early ’80s. Present in a sexed bathroom stall and at the legendary Pistols gig that made musicians of a dozen or so Mancs, the Buzzcocks are there mostly to set up the story of Factory Records. More or less content with their place in a theatrical release that’s certainly spent more celluloid on Manchester bands than anything before or since -- one that’s nonetheless the story of Factory’s Tony Wilson and his two most cinematic bands, Joy Division and Happy Mondays -- Diggle and Shelley like the film. “It’s got the Sex Pistols clip and it’s got a clip of us at that Free Trade Hall gig,” says Diggle. “And then next it jumps to 1980 and then Happy Mondays and all that sort of stuff, which came a lot later, really. The film I think is good, but there’s about five years missing of the early days.” Shelley is dispassionate when describing how the film punched up history -- and how it merely grazed the Buzzcocks’ heyday: “It was funny. I don’t know whether people would confuse some of the comedy with what really happened and what really happened with the comedy. A lot of the things which actually happened are quite funny. But it’s really just what happened a lot more with the ’80s and Factory, rather than what happened in Manchester.”

Diggle wants props for the other clubs that predated Wilson’s throbbing monument to house music. “Tony Wilson likes to rewrite history around the Hacienda,” he says. “We used to have a little club for a while. We just rented the place and showed films like Eraserhead and all that kinda stuff. Then there was this drag act, this guy called Foo Foo that used to dress up as a woman, do his bit in one half of the club and let the punks in next door. That was the first place that would let people listen to punk music in a club. And then this other place called Rafters, and they were the ones that had most of those early bands on. So that was more the scene for five years, way before the Happy Mondays and all that stuff, although they were certainly inspired by that punk scene.”

Shelley and Diggle spent the ’80s on side projects after label battles precipitated the Buzzcocks’ breakup during the making of their fourth album. Shelley went solo in ’81, managing a hit with the title track from Homosapien, a dance-pop album containing songs intended for his defunct band’s aborted release. Keeping it hard and fast, Diggle and Buzzcocks drummer John Maher formed Flag of Convenience, which lasted in one form or another until the Buzzcocks reunited for a tour in 1989. Within a year it was permanent, with Shelley, Diggle, and newcomers Barber and Philip Barker (drums) cementing what would remain the band’s current incarnation. In the ’90s they released Trade Test Transmissions (1993), All Set (1996), and Modern (1999) -- the last being a flirtation with electronic textures. A number of reissues, compilations, and live albums have been released in the four years since.

Something interesting happened in 2000. Pete Shelley and founding Buzzcocks frontman Howard Devoto played a show in London billed as Buzzkunst. Featuring noisy, electronic Shelley compositions and vitriolic Devoto vocals, the project -- now known as ShelleyDevoto -- was, according to Shelley, “meant to see whether or not we could write together.” Apparently they could. Buzzkunst came out last year, and one of their songs, “Stars,” was reworked for Buzzcocks, as was “Lester Sands,” an old sound check fan favorite that was never recorded. Sure, the two are writing together, but will Devoto, absent since he formed Magazine in ’77, ever join the Buzzcocks on tour? “I can honestly say that will never happen,” says Shelley. “He doesn’t know most of the songs.”

When Devoto left, Shelley introduced themes that were missing from many of the punk songs of the day. With the Pistols and The Clash covering chaos and class struggle, the Buzzcocks went interior. “Pete tends to add more of the love kind of thing,” says Diggle. “And we tended to write more about the human condition and the regular problems that people have. It’s more like a personal thing rather than going, ‘The government’s wrong’ and all that, because we thought the world’s a bit more complex than that.” But citing his own songs -- “Why She’s a Girl From a Chainstore,” which was inspired by Henry Miller’s everyday heroes, and “Sick City Sometimes,” a swipe at the widening income gap -- Diggle points out that there’s more in their repertoire than a bunch of love songs. And if they do often deal in relationships, “It’s not just moon-in-June stuff,” he says. “There’s a lot of things that we all feel. I mean, love’s as political as anything anyway.”

“That ‘Jerk’ song’s about somebody [Pete] phoned up,” according to Diggle, “some girlfriend he’d been seeing in Brazil and it was all goin’ a bit weird. I think he’s the jerk in that story.” Same problems, different scenarios, he’ll tell you. Shelley agrees, but indicates there might be only so many scenarios from which to pick. “So far I think I’ve avoided having written the same song twice. It always becomes more difficult with each song you write, as if there’s a finite number of songs inside of you, and you tick them off like tissues in a box.”

Buzzcocks may not mop up a sneeze quite like tissues past, but the band’s current live show demonstrates that as Shelley’s box empties, time steps in like a silk hankie just back from the cleaners. “Even the songs I wrote over 20 years ago, they take on a new, different meaning. That’s why they still can be fresh.”

home | bio | resume | writing | email