It’s the words, isn’t it? The best words ever. No, it’s the urgent, urgent music, too, isn’t it? Buzzcocks weren’t like any other band. When they arrived in the 70s, they felt fully formed. Pete Shelley was studying philosophy and comparative literature when he got swept up into a band, then became frontman.
How could he not have been? Look at that face in those early clips. Innocently he asks, “Do I look vile and obscene?” He had been called that apparently.
Punk wasn’t on the whole very good on sex. Squelching noises, as John Lydon called it. It was about more important things, probably. Social breakdown or something ... All I know is I went to lots of gigs where there was little happening on stage except blokes shouting “fuck off” in various formations, with some added violence among the men in the crowd. If I wanted to dance – which I did – I went to blues parties in Brixton.
But with Buzzcocks, well, they were different. For girls. They were anxious and poppy and therefore deemed by some to be not punk enough. What an enormous relief. Shelley was not scared to be intelligent, and that was just one of his hooks. He could do in two and a half minutes what a lesser band couldn’t achieve in an entire album.
It goes without saying Shelley was a sublime lyricist. And just as great painters know when to stop, he had the incredible gift of paring everything down to the bone. Sometimes in a Buzzcocks song, it’s when the words stop. It’s the bit in Orgasm Addict where he says uh-huh over and over. Or in Boredom when the guitar repeats. All excess is trimmed away.
Did I understand this at the time? Yes and no. The Clash were always too macho for me – I had several rows about them with various boyfriends. Punk was never the homogenous thing it is so often made out to have been. I was a bit terrified of the Slits and worshipped Nina Hagen. I saw everyone you were meant to see and then Buzzcocks: northern and campy, with songs about wanking and unrequited love and confused sex and existentialism. There was Shelley: so cute, so queer, so not giving a fuck – wearing badges that said “I like boys”.
He once claimed Morrissey got the idea of gender fluid lyrics off him. To be fair, we all got our ideas off him. Bisexuality is not a recent invention. Of his sexuality, he said: “It tends to change as much as the weather.” Marvellous! I have many a friend who spent interesting nights with him. They didn’t mind if he didn’t mind. In I Don’t Mind, he sang: “Reality’s a dream / A game in which I never seem to never find out just what I am / I don’t know if I’m an actor or ham / A shamen or a sham but if you don’t mind I don’t mind.”
The band’s cover sleeves were by Linder, they were managed by Richard Boon – who I got to know as our local librarian. Buzzcocks became a band you went a long way to see. Even up north.
Now I see all the other bands they have influenced, and yet back then Buzzcocks were uncategorisable. Too poppy to be pure punk and somehow supposedly not political enough. Nothing could be further from the truth. Shelley said: “Well, I never knew there was a law against sounding vulnerable. And anyway, personal politics are part of the human condition, so what could be more political than human relationships?” Quite, quite brilliant.
“I think I know the words that I mean,” he sang so effortlessly, that coy boy. “Boredom–boredom–b’dum-b’dum.” I fell in love in the breaks where words don’t fail him but where he gets to the core. “Me and you sir, Homosapien too.” Pure sulphate chord changes. Cheap thrills. Subversion or perversion. Or truth? Masturbating over “international women with no body hair”.
Bow down to the homosuperior. There were so many moments strung together into the perfect energy. They remain with us here.
“I don’t know what to do with my life,” he sang. Oh, you shy boy. You so did.
• Suzanne Moore is a Guardian columnist
