To talk of pop history to sketch in or fumble towards a geneaolgy of commercial youth music that flags the moments and faces and noises of proper significance is maybe a foolhardy undertaking. Hindsight can be valuable - of course - but it cannot rekindle (or revoke.) the feel of a particular rush and its split-second importance.

Turning on a radio and being transfixed by an unexpected music; glimpsing an image or a movement on a screen or a stage; running home breathless with a new record. . . the intransigence - the momentary heat of pop music reduces history to an errative and illogical string of memory pockets - flashes and fragments stitched by personal favours - affections - exposures and chance encounters.

The beauty of 'everyone has their favourites' means that such incredibly diverse groups as The Sex Pistols - The Clash and Buzzcocks dominated 1977- in the same way that Abba - Television and Graham Parker also did. Or - to put it another way - what you remember most be you artist - consumer or critic in guise - is your historical mainline. Your memory is your perspective.

Buzzcocks are one of the things I remember most; and I'd suggest that their impression stuck to many memories - more - perhaps - than that of their peer groups who've lasted far longer - many influential memories. Buzzcocks cast an influence over an articulacy they helped to uncage - the lovers' remorse they revelled in - a credence in pure romance and the shark tooth drone they played on and finally played out - and at the same time they remained tangential to all their following groups.

They became a trigger - a catch loosened on the great stretch of possibilities not indulged in by what we can responsibly refer to as post-Buzzcocks pop.

The history of Buzzcocks - like the history Buzzcocks are inside - can best be remembered as a jumbled - uncertain sequence of snapshots: so let's reconsider - in a love sometimes touched by anger - what Buzzcocks left behind them - three LPs - a dozen 45s - an opportunity never quite grasped.

'Spiral Scratch' - the one (legitimate) surviving example of Buzzcocks under the joint guidance of Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto - stands up well - if pale and scratched both as a hastily scribbled blueprint for the two different directions Shelley and Devoto were to take and as a pre-emptive foray into the treatment of the sheer frustrations of affection between people which moderne pop has now come to accept and rationalise.

What Devoto was singing about on the four scrappy little songs - recorded in a beat-the-studio-clock rush at the very end of 1976- was a view of love as a source of boredom - resentment - release - very occasional relief: no great revelation - maybe. But the way it was put over- in Devoto's own sickly snarl - in Shelley's strangely spangled chords ('starway guitar' as the credit had it) - in 16-year-old John Maher's impetuous and irritating drum rolls- linked it with the punky-clamour that Buzzcocks almost accidentally found themselves caught up in and whispered of a revitalisation of the eternal concern of pop music.

'Boredom' and 'Breakdown'-titles entrenched in the spirit of '76 -- coursed across emotional battlegrounds with the same charged fervour that 'the punks' were employing to (mostly) far less coherent ends. The grey polaroid on the cover spoke as eloquently as the noise: Devoto diffident and faintly smug. Maher br()ly youthful - Steve Diggle (then playing bass) distantly tough - Shelley furtive but inquiring.

Most of all - it roared. It stormed. It started like a thunder crack - bolted over 1:58 without the least tremor of hesitation and hit the buffers minus any dislocative jolt. Martin Rushent's production made Buzzcocks gleam where Foot's sound had subdued The Clash and Thomas had mired the Pistols in stodge.

Buzzcocks released the second UA single - 'What Do I Get?' - in January 1978. Almost directly contemporary with Magazine's 'Shot By Both Sides' - Shelley's song somehow faced all the trauma which Devoto - for all his brilliance - always viewed with a cooler detachment.

'What Do I Get?' is probably the most significant and prophetic single of its era. It begins with a guitar chord reverse-echoed into sudden focus - like an indecision abruptly channelled into impassioned certainty - before the now immortal 'I just want a lover like any other - what do I get? 'Shelley sings it with a kind of insomniacal ('I only get sleepless nights!') entreaty in his voice - bridging the forlorn and the frustrated; the instruments charge and blur the simple chord pattern and the middle section has one guitar merely twanging out the melody - an emblem rooted in the very foundations of beat group playing.

That classical pop feel - twinned with the sense of a new confrontation with the emotions that Buzzcocks seemed to be dealing with; the almost unearthly tensions brought about by Maher's drumming and the fragility of the singing - no other group was making music like this. 'What Do I Get?' is Shelley's Buzzcocks at their most complete and untainted: it is virginal in its unaffectedness. Its brief flirtation with the lower reaches of the charts did it no justice whatsoever.

If 'What Do I Get?' set a standard they could mostly only allude to - another transient moment - then 'Another Music Is A Different Kitchen' at least progressed on its implications. In shape their first LP took the form all its successors were to follow: a first side of short - flaring pop songs and a second where Shelley's insecure fascination with structure and electric noise was given a greater rein. Fittingly - it garnered a mixed reception. Buzzcocks were never supposed to be an LP group.

Shelley exorcised Devoto's influence by racking their last collaborations beside his own newer songs. 'Fast Cars' - 'You Tear Me Up' and 'Love Battery' were explorations of how the inanimate harboured metaphors of raw feeling - masques of intellectual diversion: Shelley tore through them. His contributions to the first side were romantic in a way Devoto dared not face - 'No Reply' was straight telephone angst - 'Get On Our Own' explicable adolescent hunger and 'Sixteen' - well - 'Sixteen' bled all over 'Substitute' ('You only want me because I'm so young!') and set its iron-grey chords to finger the bogus hard rockers of the new wave. When Shelley blurted that it went 'on and on and on 'he sounded bitterly disappointed at the surrounding truth.

Along with 'I Don't Mind' - which begins the second side - it was a group of songs conceived and executed with the stinging - reverberant purity that imbued records like 'Fifth Dimension' or 'With The Beatles' - except the way it walked talked - stripped away ornamentation and held out hooks that felt like fistfuls of needles shot the music several worlds distant from such arcane pop masterpieces.

But Shelley wanted even more than that - the two longest tracks on the record took on in interest in repetition leading to the point of sensibility and a trait of deep pessimism in he worth of his enterprise - as if he saw Buzzcocks pop as too ephemeral to stand up. 'Fiction Romance' slowed it to a worried mid-pace lament and 'Moving Away From The Pulsebeat' dispensed with it altogether- replete with infamous drum solo and headache guitar refrain. It was seen then as a new group toying with lumpy old serious group values; now its simplistic radicalism seems almost quaint. After an unbearable pause a reprise of the intro to 'Breakdown comes in like a ghost - without reason or form.

It wasn't entirely Shelley's obsession. Steve Diggle offered 'Autonomy' - it sounded like a disturbed fantasy on Shelley's dream - impaled n a chromatic line of fearful brutality - fascinatingly obtuse - and co-wrote 'I Need' - which showed off the prowess of the new bass layer Steve Garvey. And if the central vision in this Buzzcocks emanated from Shelley - 'Another Music' remains a record of brilliant playing- its familiar constituents came out shaken because all the members seemed to hear differently - something almost akin to Dylan's 'silver sound'. This should be in your memories as a great LP.

They rushed to record the following 'Love Bites' as if concerned at the time already lost. As a result it came out sounding stretched - hurried - hungry in a wasted rather than predatory sense. There was no real indication of advance no forays into specifically new terrain - it stood as an uncomplicated encore - if not a mere rerun.

Yet 'Love Bites' still frequented Shelley's haunted romance. He used his pngt like an amulet over the songs to charm away the weariness Buzzcocks must have felt. The first half again came out like a choker of fiercely gleaming pop stones - the tempo fractionally slowed but a clear-eyed sense of melody lent to their unmistakable razor-burr noise. 'Ever Fallen In Love' was their biggest single hit and epitomised a wistful regret they had come to make their own

What was happening to Buzzcocks? They were pulling themselves apart.

It was clear by 1979 that they would never make the headway that statesmen like Weller and Strummer would. Shelley insisted on his romance; Diggle - who called himself a kid in the street. stuck to (albeit very different) love songs too. Garvey wanted more than anything just to be a pop star. Maher said he didn't listen to the lyrics: he wanted to play better and better. He even took lessons. How were this group ever going to make it?

Buzzcocks live were more often depressing than exhilarating. Shelley had to strain his voice too often - the exemplary control of the best two-guitar line in pop as harnessed by Rushent toppled into an unfocused thrash. It was like a lovers' dream gone stale and ugly.

The three singles after 'Love Bites' scarcely freshened their taste for trying - each meeting with at best tacit approval. 'Promises'! Lipstick suggested they'd be content with an almost mantra-like drone filleted by an occasional hook: the different treatments of the sequence that makes up both 'Lipstick' and Shot By Both Sides' offer salutary listening -one affected darkness - the other darkly effective.

The derided 'Everybody's Happy Nowadays' traipsed Shelley's worst judgements into view 'Life's the illusion - love is the dream. 'But 'Harmony In My Head' should have changed everything. 'Harmony In My Head' was their best 45 since 'What Do I Get?' Rushent seemed to suddenly reappraise Buzzcocks' strengths: the guitars were bevelled into harder instruments - the drums were made enormous. It was Steve

Diggle's song and he sang it with a throaty anger that directly challenged Shelley's rubbery legato style.

Shelley and the rest of Buzzcocks were growing - distant. Their final LP 'A Different Kind Of Tension' (such ironies!) lime lighted nothing so much as the differences that had blown up between Shelley and Diggle In songs like 'You Just Can't Help It' Diggle stomped over the wispier reveries that Shelley -still embraced; while his companion fell adrift in music that had abruptly grown hard - exclusive - almost ruthless. It was Diggle who was beginning to pilot Buzzcocks. not Shelley.

Only beginning - nine of the 12 songs were Shelley's. But Diggle's writing was showing the only possibilities for progression. 'Sitting Round At Home' replayed their favourite theme of repetition with methodical force - 'You Know You Can't Help It' stained the dream with blunt carnality and 'Mad Mad Judy' had a murderous rip to it - the instrumental tension held breathlessly. Diggle claimed his songs sprang from a working class inferiority complex: these examples dealt with it conclusively - 'I got all the answers!' he sneers at 'Judy's' close.

With one glorious exception - Shelley sounded confused - disoriented - grown up and not liking it. 'Paradise' is callow in a way he must have recognised. The second side is all his - he groups his hopes and fears as on the first half of 'Another Music' but it's a far more painful journey. 'Money' is a maxim. 'Hollow Inside' a question and 'I Don't Know What To Do With My Life' is bait. They sound depressingly ordinary and the vocals take on the drone that Buzzcocks guitars were supposed to approximate (though they never actually did). Shelley was growing sullen.

'He made 'A Different Kind Of Tension' itself a long list - an arbitrary string of words. The others simply back him up. Listen close and you can hear a group cracking open. 'I Believe' was the end: it goes on and on and on - for over seven minutes. Shelley's voice takes on a cartoon edge to suit a catechism of purposeless flippancy - it kills the record's impact stone dead. With 'There is no love in this world any more' he sounded not cleansed of heartbreak but drained to a br().

But that exception in the middle of the first side is 'You Say You Don't Love Me' - his most cannily beautiful song since 'I Don't Mind'. A familiar melody of lustrous warmth - enclosed a lyric of far more truth than the crumbly proselytising of 'I Believe' - 'I wanted to live in a dream / That couldn't be real / I'm starting to understand now / The way that you feel.'

Along with 'I Don't Mind' - which begins the second side - it was a group of songs conceived and executed with the stinging - reverberant purity that imbued records like 'Fifth Dimension' or 'With The Beatles' -except the way it walked - talked - stripped away ornamentation and held out hooks that Felt like fistfuls of needles shot the music several worlds distant from such arcane pop masterpieces.

It was the autumn of 1979. Over the next 18 months Buzzcocks put out a last triumvirate of singles that were anything but triumphant - muddied stabs at experimentation that sounded as patchwork and unsure (or perhaps overdone) as 'Spiral Scratch'. Except the last one - for which Buzzcocks summoned a violence suppressed on one side - exhaled on the other.

Diggle's 'Running Free' let a keyboard pin the cornerstone and clouded it in an exceptionally dense production that released the subtlety of a peaceful - pensive song only after many listens. Shelley's 'What Do You Know?' was an explosive retort in answer. A brass section came in to argue directly with a breathtaking electric barrage and Shelley gave his all: 'There's no turning back now/I'm under attack now!' But it was the final paragraph.

6 March 1981 Pete Shelley announced he is leaving Buzzcocks end the group effectively ceases to exist

It doesn't seem to amount to much for the time capsule: five years of working at playing - not many records - a lot of disappointments and frustrations - an erratic and jumpy series of highpoints. Pete Shelley has his continuing association with Martin Rushent and the fine 'Homosapien' can surely be built on; Steve Diggle and John Maher are beginning again with the monochrome promise of Flag Of Convenience.

Buzzcocks bore many offspring - though they wear very different clothes. There's no need to point to particular groups. As has recently been remarked - an hour with the radio should register the tremors - the points of detail.

As we circle back - I will reiterate my first points: Buzzcocks must take their place in history as a starting gun. They were the first modern pop group - the first to charge a molten punky noise with a fountainhead of true romance and bring it to the ears of a multitude. We can hardly hold it against them that it has also sired a flood of sheer banality Hendrix might as well be crucified for inventing heavy metal.

I'll remember 'What Do I Get?'. 'Another Music In A Different Kitchen' - 'Harmony In My Head' and 'You Say You Don't Love Me' as long as I remember pop - I suppose. I think most of you will have other favourites too. It's a dream that won't altogether fade.

---------
ShotByBothSides.com/nme_260682.htm