Pete Shelley, singer-songwriter

We’d just been on the White Riot tour with the Clash, the Slits and Subway Sect. It was the first time that people really got to see what punk was about. We were in a van from Salford Van Hire. It was the first time we’d spent more than a day away from home. That tour kickstarted people to take more of an active interest in punk, rather than just a passive one. It all happened so fast.

At the bigger shows, like at Manchester’s Electric Circus, kids were ripping the seats out. We signed to United Artists on the day Elvis died [16 August 1977] and suddenly had an album to do and an audience who wanted to see us. After one of our shows in Edinburgh, we were in the Blenheim guest house with pints of beer, sitting in the TV room half-watching Guys and Dolls. This line just leapt out at me: “Have you ever fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t’ve? Wait till it happens to you.” I thought, “Ooh. That gives me an idea.” The next day, while our driver was posting something, I sat in the van outside the post office and came up with the first line, “You piss on my natural emotions.” Then I changed “piss” to “spurn”, which had a more barbed edge to it.

I wrote it about Francis, who was the social sec at Warrington Tech. I was going through self-discovery, shall we say, a fertile ground for writing songs. In the initial courtship he was resistant to my charms. I loved the word “shouldn’t’ve” and all its apostrophes. The song hurtles into the intro. We were trying to pare things back from the norm of what music should be. There’s a tension that resolves when the chorus starts and I put in a magic dip – a tiny pause – before the last chorus to give the listener a lift.

Me and producer Martin Rushent did the three or four part harmonies. You never think this is the song everyone will remember, but it struck a chord because everyone experiences unrequited love. Francis was on that trip to Scotland, so he probably knew it was about him but nobody else did. Our relationship ended up lasting seven years, but you take something specific and make it universal. We used to do tours for singles, so we were building up, paying our dues. In that year we had an album [Another Music in a Different Kitchen] in March and another [Love Bites] in September. We were at the peak of our creativity. We were on Top of the Pops every couple of weeks. So Ever Fallen in Love came at just the right point. It hit the sweet spot in our trajectory.

It was three years after the Sex Pistols’ first gig but things change really fast. The Fine Young Cannibals 1988 version of Ever Fallen in Love got to No 9, which was three places higher than ours. Does that irritate me? I guess so, yes [laughs]. But their version financed our comeback, just like John Lydon’s butter advert financed Public Image Ltd’s. Next year will be the 30th anniversary of our reunion, and we’re just past the 42nd year [overall]. I’m sure fate has a few things in store for us. I think we deserve a punk cruise. A Bahamian voyage.

Malcolm Garrett, sleeve designer

I was studying graphic design at Manchester Polytechnic and sharing a smelly flat above a fishmonger’s in Rusholme with fellow student John McGeoch. One Saturday, we had a party which was attended by Pete Shelley and [initial Buzzcocks singer] Howard Devoto. That party changed our lives. John met Howard and they started the band Magazine, and I offered to do designs for Buzzcocks. Pete had just taken over from Howard on vocals and I saw their gig at Band on the Wall. There’s a photo from that gig where you can see my backcombed, bleached hair in the front row. Punk seemed to be happening simultaneously all over the country and gave us a feeling that we had secret knowledge that the rest of the world didn’t have. It felt important and slightly dangerous. I’d walk home to the flat on edge because I didn’t know who I would run in to.

I designed the Buzzcocks logo and a poster, which I based on a newspaper small ad for one-legged tights. At first, the record company only gave us two colours for the record sleeves, because it was cheaper, but that became key to the aesthetic. We wanted to be different from everyone, including the Sex Pistols. Buzzcocks manager Richard Boon was a fine art graduate and for Ever Fallen in Love had the idea of using Marcel Duchamp’s Fluttering Hearts. I was a fan of Duchamp but wasn’t familiar with that particular piece, so I remember standing in a call box while Richard described it to me over the phone.

My drawing looked remarkably like the one he’d been talking about. It’s called Fluttering Hearts because it seems to flicker. He had to explain over the phone where the apostrophes went. The handwriting is mine but it was mimicking a René Magritte painting, because he was [drummer] John Maher’s favourite artist. Fluttering Hearts is red and blue, but I swapped the colours round for the sleeve and made the predominant colour red not blue, because virtually every song that Pete’s ever written is about love gone wrong. So a fucked up heart represents all Pete’s lyrics. He could write in a sentence more information than other people could put in a page. I always said he was the PG Wodehouse of punk.

• The Collected Lyrics of Pete Shelley and Buzzcocks, with a cover designed by Malcolm Garrett, is out now on Eyewear Publishing. Remastered editions of Buzzcocks first two albums, Another Music in a Different Kitchen and Love Bites, are released on Domino on 25 January.