 ver fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have fallen in love with? Of course you have. But if you were a punk fan in 1976, romantic guidance was hard to come by; all you were getting from your favorite bands was anarchy and safety pins.
Enter the Buzzcocks, who, from their first single ("Orgasm Addict") spat out bratty romantic complaints with the speed of the Sex Pistols and the tunefulness of the early Beatles. Singer/songwriter/guitarist Pete Shelley delivered short and catchy bursts of cheeky longing (see "Why Can’t I Touch It") that offered a welcome alternative to both the nihilism of punk and the sentimentality of mainstream love songs. A bittersweet sharpness — a hint of real desperation — gave Shelley’s lyrics a pathos to match their wit.
The lonely bisexual satyr who starred in the Buzzcocks’ songs turns out to be a close match with the man himself. Decades into his career, Shelley remains playful and charming, with exactly the wistfulness you’d expect from the man who brought romantic melancholy to punk rock. It’s as if "Everybody’s Happy Nowadays" had gotten up off the record and started walking around.
Since their reformation in 1989, the Buzzcocks have released five albums. The latest, Flat-Pack Philosophy, finds Shelley’s lovelorn words and urgent hooks, by some mysterious punk alchemy, undiminished in their impact. When "Wish I Never Loved You" builds to an irresistible chorus of "Tell me why-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay," you’ll feel seventeen again. Not a bad trick for a fifty-one-year-old punker, albeit one with a twinkle in his eye. When the band swung by Brooklyn for a show, Hooksexup asked Shelley how he pulled it off. — Peter Smith
The rule is that punk bands get back together and then they’re terrible and the whole thing is really depressing. But your new album is solid and catchy and energetic all the way through.
It’s the only way that it would sustain our interest.
So you couldn’t just cash in even if you wanted to.
Well… it’d be nice to be given the opportunity [laughs]. I mean, since I’ll be retiring soon. No, I would never sell out, because nobody’s offering enough money.
Did you go in with a unified plan, a sense of what the record would be like? Or do you just write songs and make an album when you’ve got fourteen that you like?
We have a vague idea. The thing about recording a new album is even if you have the songs, you’re still going to learn something new about them. A mistake can send you in a whole different direction and change the song entirely. There’s no going into the studio and just recording the songs, like, say, Elvis used to do. Like "Here’s the song I wrote this morning," record it and it’s #1 by the weekend. Because of that, and because in the studio you have to listen to the songs again and again and again, if the song’s not strong, then you might as well not enter into the process, or you’re just going to end up with a full day of a three-minute song you don’t even like.
Your music hasn’t really aged at all.
We don’t put many external references in it. It’s usually things which are of a timeless nature. Feeling bored, falling in love and falling out of love, and love not going smoothly. Those things really don’t change. I wish they would. I wish, in some ways, the things that I’ve sung about would all vanish. But it doesn’t work like that.
Are you tired of every new album getting compared to your old albums?
Well, no. It’s been done with this one, and the reviews which we’ve had have been saying it’s as good as anything we’ve done. In some ways it’s inevitable, whether or not it’s desirable. Things are never going to be the same as they were when you got whichever album — probably Singles Going Steady. But even that was never an album, it was just a package of singles to bring America up to speed because we’d released two albums in Britain. The songs were chosen because of the fact that they rose to the top of whatever we were playing at the time. As an album, it’s a greatest hits compilation, essentially.
This new album sounds like that.
Well, we pay for the recording. Might as well get it right.
Do you still relate to your older songs, like "What Do I Get" or "Ever Fallen in Love"?
Yeah. The good thing is that the songs are still relevant in everyday life. And also, each time we play the songs it’s a new experience. A lot of people think that music is a spectator sport. But I’m a great believer in participating, and singing. It’s fantastic. To listen to a song is nice, but to sing along is even better. We get lots of people in the audience who believe that as well. And there’s all sorts of crazy shit going on. When we did this festival in Britain, we were playing "Ever Fallen in Love" and the amp blew up. Each time is different. And we have enough songs so that we can just discretely not mention one of them sometimes.
Beyond the musical enjoyment, does the song still ring true to you? Are you more successful in love than you were in the ’70s?
Well, no, not really [laughs]. I mean, I sometimes… there’re some moments where I actually despair about whether or not love is a mental condition. I suppose, I mean, the events in my life at the moment are conspiring to mess me up even more.
I’m sorry to hear it.
Well, you figure you’ll get a good album out of it. [laughs]
In the old days you were much more personal than political, and this album has more of a political stance, about materialism and debt.
Yes, and the fact that everything everywhere looks the same.
Have you been noticing that on tour?
Well, it was a few years ago we first started noticing it. It’s good in some ways. If you need new underwear, the store where you buy it is always there. The world’s a lot more consumerist now, or it seems to be. And also, the whole credit debt thing that people get themselves into is a lot worse. They get you where you have no chance of paying them back just so you can keep paying them interest until you die. It’s something that affects you personally but it’s also very political. [pause] Of course, if everybody wants to get into debt buying Buzzcocks records, that’s fine. At least at the end of the day they’ll have something of value. But a lot of the things that people spend their money on are worse then disposable. A disposable light that says "Anarchy in the UK," maybe.
Beyond being an unusually personal punk band, you were also a very sexual punk band.
In the ’70s, all love songs were "baby, baby, baby," and I thought, well, there’s another way you can write love songs.
So something like "Orgasm Addict" could be a love song?
Well, that was more of a condemnation really.
But you could express love sexually, but not…
In the rock ‘n’ roll cliché way. That was further taken on by Morrissey of course.
Do you like the Smiths?
Some things. I never had any hearing aid or gladiolas.
How many people knew about your bisexuality before you discussed it publicly in 1981?
It just seemed to me the logical description for my sexuality. By 1971 or ’72 David Bowie came out, and I was a big Bowie fan as well. To me that seemed right, that’s who I am. The problem with saying you were gay was that your girlfriend used to get very confused. But the sexuality only happens with the person, rather than the gender. So if you have the right person, something may happen. Or it may not. But for many years bisexuality seemed to be a non-existent status. Straight people consider you to be gay and gay people consider you to be straight, or gay but without any commitment.
But the rest of the band wasn’t surprised?
Well, I think they knew. It wasn’t that in 1981 I just announced it. The controversy over the "Homosapien" single [which was banned by the BBC] was one of the reasons I was talking about it. But before that it was an open secret, shall we say. You could read it in John Lydon’s autobiography.
There’s a bittersweet loneliness in a lot of those old Buzzcocks singles. Do you feel like your bisexuality contributed to that, or was it a non-issue?
Sex when you’re growing up is confusing. In order to get a relationship started you have to convince the other person of the validity of the idea [laughs]. And that’s a very lonely thing. So part of the alienation is the existential aloneness rather than anything linked directly to sexuality.
Do you still feel that kind of alienation, that wistful aloneness?
Sometimes, I suppose. Not all the time. I don’t know, there are still lots of aspects of existence I have yet to explore. n°
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Flat-Pack Philosophy
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© 2006 Peter Smith and hooksexup.com.
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