Michael Bracewell - Friday February 25, 2k - The Guardian

Never mind the Buzzcocks

or Magazine, or Luxuria - Howard Devoto has left the rotting corpse of punk and found peace archiving photographs

Of all the icons assembled in the pantheon of punk, Howard Devoto could most probably lay claim to being the most enigmatic and the most revered. He was described by Pete Frame (the creator of Rock Family Trees) as "the Orson Welles of punk", and pronounced in a tribute song by Momus to be the Most Important Man Alive. Morrissey stated that it was Devoto whom he had in mind when he wrote The Last of the Famous International Playboys, while Paul Morley claimed that Devoto introduced a "new literacy not just into punk, but into rock as a whole". He has also been cited as an influence by novelists as different in style as DJ Taylor and Jeff Noon.

And yet Devoto himself remains mysterious. His guru-like status is all the more respected for the dignified manner in which he has allowed his body of recorded work and published lyrics to represent him. Having co-founded, respectively, two of the most influential groups of the punk period, the Buzzcocks and Magazine, he then went on to record a solo album, Jerky Versions of the Dream, before forming his third and final group, Luxuria, in 1986.

He ceased recording professionally in 1990, preferring the anonymity of a day job to some kind of honorary position in the music business as an elder statesman of cultural revolution. With regard to his current employment, Devoto has little to say. "I am the manager of the archive at a leading photographic agency in central London. I also receive royalties from my recordings." He is neither open nor defensive about his working life beyond music, except to say that Luxuria did not deliver the support he required to proceed.

"There was something very limiting about punk," he states, in a tone which is both assertive and measured - Alan Bennett without the soft edges"and in the early days that was punk's strength. You knew your themes, you knew how to look and you knew your musical style. And there you were, for a while. But I'd loved all kinds of other music up to that point. There was some big elemental thing that happened with the Sex Pistols, but in terms of music there was a whole gamut of other stuff which I had liked, and which, in the realm of ideas, was not a totally different tin of biscuits - Leonard Cohen, Dylan, David Bowie. With the Pistols and Iggy Pop, it was the anger and poetry which hooked me in, really."

In the spring of 1976, in Manchester, Devoto co-founded the Buzzcocks with guitarist Pete Shelley. They recorded the massively influential Spiral Scratch EP and a highly collectable official bootleg, Time's Up, both of which are being re-released on Mute Records.

Heard now, these recordings have lost none of their fizzed-up, self-aware energy, driven by Shelley's sublime reinvention of jagged, high-speed pop guitar playing. On machine-gun tempo songs such as Friends of Mine, Boredom and Orgasm Addict, Devoto delivers his smart lyrics with an edgy petulance which disguises their wit and biting acuity as a kind of pantomime of dumbness. "You're making out with school kids, winos and heads of state," he lashes out on Orgasm Addict, "You're making out with the lady who puts the little plastic robins on the Christmas cake."

Artistically, the young Devoto was responding to influences from Alice Cooper to Camus. Having studied philosophy as a student, and having been interested in meditation, his lyrics on Spiral Scratch and Time's Up were fully intended to be carefully posed, self-questioning philosophical statements about the problems of existence.

Interviewing himself, when Spiral Scratch was originally released in 1977, Devoto wrote of the song Breakdown, "[Its] hero is in the position of Camus' Sisyphus - 'To will is to stir up paradoxes.' " In this respect, punk rock had been a personal and creative catalyst for Devoto, offering him a means to conduct nothing less than a biopsy on his own soul.

"I think that punk rock was a new version of troubleshooting modern forms of unhappiness," he says. "And I think that a lot of our cultural activity is concerned with that process, particularly in our more privileged world, with time on our hands - in a world, most probably, after religion. My life changed at the point I saw the Sex Pistols and became involved in trying to set up those concerts for them. Suddenly I was drawn into something that really engaged me. Punk was nihilistic anger, not overtly political anger. Political anger could have been the radical 60s."

"But going back to what I was going through personally, and all of the stuff that you go through as a student, I remember - before punk even - pursuing Artaud's Theatre of Cruelty; I had pictures of the Baader-Meinhof on my wall, and all of that hunger strike stuff was going on. It was that struggle for commitment which you have as a young person. And where do you put all that when you're a young person like me, who wanted to play a 'Yes, but ' game with everything ?"

Since 1990, Devoto has given the whole punk unions circuit an extremely wide berth, as well as being highly reluctant to offer up his recollections to what has become the major academic industry of "punk studies".

An example of this reticence could be seen in his contribution to the 1996 colixorative documentary about the two Sex Pistols concerts which were held at Manchester's Lesser Free Trade Hall in the summer of 1976. Despite being the man who actually arranged these concerts - with his own first group, the Buzzcocks, supporting at the second - Devoto chose to be represented on the programme by a reel-to-reel tape-recorder, playing a recording of his few comments about the occasion. Person to person, he can give a meticulous account of his involvement in punk, often using factual information and chronology as a means of avoiding generalised statements about punk's "attitude".

"Can I just say," he states, "that what I don't buy are things like a piece I read by Caroline Coon about punk a few years ago, which said how desolate the mid-70s were, culturally and politically. And I don't buy John Lydon's line, either, in this new film The Filth and the Fury, where he's going on about the 'system being really oppressive in Britain, and that's why punk rock happened'. In myself, I can't say that I was feeling particularly great at that time - but what's new ?"

Having left the Buzzcocks almost as soon as they released their first record, Devoto formed Magazine as a way of expanding the possibilities that had been opened by punk. In a leaving statement issued on February 21, 1977, he wrote: "I don't like most of this new wave music. I don't like music. I don't like movements. Despite all that, things still have to be said. But I am not confident of the Buzzcocks' intention to get out of the dry land of new waveness to a place from which these things could be said. What was once unhealthily fresh is now a clean old hat."

As ever, Devoto's stance was one of disaffection and dissatisfaction - rejecting the early complacency into which punk rock so readily dropped, prior to becoming little more than a picture postcard parody of itself. With Magazine, he explored the causes of this stance through lyrics and performance which were at once disturbing and playfully self-aware and endlessly self-questioning.

Musically, Magazine comprised the formidable team of Dave Formula, John McGeoch and Barry Adamson, whose own solo work would pursue the idea of attempting to solve the case of oneself. In hindsight, Magazine would have found their place in the history of music on the strength of just one of their early recordings, Shot By Both Sides.

"Magazine was its own particular blend of trying to contain a certain sort of intelligence in that sort of music. One of my partners of those years, asking about a Magazine lyric, said, 'Is that about you and me ?' And I said, 'You'll never know because I swap them around.' But also in Magazine there was the idea of me addressing the audience and making ambiguous pronouncements about our respective roles - your idea of me, and my idea of you. And I was really playing with that during the period of the first two Magazine LPs, when I was in the prime of my ambition. I'm still proud of Magazine. Half a lifetime of feeling went into it."

"And I'm sure that I tried to rant on about the importance, to me, of paradox and contradiction. That there is some state of grace or point of ultimate knowledge in trying to come to an aesthetic understanding of these things. I'm trying to explain the song Shot By Both Sides, I suppose, and this is the area that I've explored in everything I've done since the Buzzcocks."

In many ways, Devoto's life since adolescence, when he first started to write, has been an epic of self-portraiture. Even now, he is writing his autobiography and recording it as a spoken-word document, to be left to the National Sound Archive after his death. He has barely reached the middle 70s and the work is already 20 chapters/10 hours long, and includes 150 samples of music. Not surprisingly, one of his favourite authors is Marcel Proust. His own writing, as a lyricist, has articulated his personal position with an eloquence and originality that rivals much of the best contemporary fiction and drama.

But at the heart of his constant enquiry - as revealed with brooding poignancy on his final LP with Luxuria, Beast Box - seems to lie a fear of what he might discover if he could actually answer his own questions. "They've opened the Beast Box, haven't they ?" he concludes on the title track of that LP, and even on the haunting crescendo of Railings, which he recorded in 1998 for the rock group Mansun, his distinctive voice appeared to croon from its own grave, "Don't burn your hand on the window, if you just want to take in the view."

"Life is hell," says Devoto during this interview, neither joking nor seeking to shock. "I don't think I've ever strayed very far from that idea since I was about 20. Now, in the last 10 years, since I've essentially quit music, I've come to some kind of accommodation with that. But that's really how I feel, and it's one big reason why so far I don't have kids."

"From where I was, in 1990, I suppose that most people in my position would try to find another niche for themselves in the music business. But I have too much damaging, damaging pride. And if you take my lack of confidence, and you take my pride - well, there you really are shot by both sides."

Time's Up (Mute) is out on March 6.