The late Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks once told NME: “Before we do a song, I make sure that song is going to stand the test of time.” It was a ridiculous thing to say, especially in 1978. Punk had sprung into the global consciousness a year earlier thanks largely to the release of the Sex Pistols’ debut album, Never Mind the Bollocks, and was already being declared obsolete, a failed revolution whose initial shock had immediately faded into tame self-parody. As quick as punk emerged, a throng of bands started drifting away from the rock’n’roll punch of punk toward a broader post-punk sound. The original movement seemed happy to be a fleeting thing, a bomb that went off leaving nothing but shrapnel.
Yet Buzzcocks forged ahead with a classic punk sound. In 1978 alone, the Manchester band released their first two studio albums, Another Music in a Different Kitchen and Love Bites, and while each bore traces of experimentation, they owed much more to punk mainstays Ramones than to the protracted krautrock of Can. By 1979, groups that had been directly inspired by Buzzcocks—including Joy Division and the Fall—were already releasing some of the most important post-punk records of all time. Buzzcocks’ fellow punk pioneers in the Clash and the Jam were expanding the vocabulary of punk without losing the movement’s edge. Buzzcocks responded to some of these towering post-punk statements not with one of their own, but with a humble collection of singles.
Singles Going Steady, which begins with the band’s first eight singles, came out in 1979 in the U.S.; it wasn’t released in Buzzcocks’ native UK until 1981, as the band was on the verge of a breakup. It didn’t make the charts in either place, but that two-year gap is telling. As the punk ’70s segued into the post-punk ’80s, it was clear that Buzzcocks inspired little confidence about their staying power. Compilation albums, especially back then, often had the uncanny ability to signal the end of a band’s relevance, if not their lifespan. The fact that Buzzcocks released an anthology of singles a mere two years into their recording career made Singles Going Steady—despite the cheery wordplay of its title—seem less like a triumph and more like a tombstone. There was a ring of finality to it, a sense of chips being cashed in. If Shelley wanted to make timeless music and go down in history, he was going about it in the worst way possible.
But history wasn’t counting on Shelley’s songs themselves. From the start, Buzzcocks had no desire to be a typical punk band. With nimbleness and pluck, they pivoted from the sardonic snarl of their debut EP Spiral Scratch—their only studio recording with Howard Devoto, another defector from punk to post-punk, as their lead singer—to their first single, 1977’s “Orgasm Addict.” The song was co-written by Shelley and Devoto but sung by Shelley in his new role as frontman. The contrast was striking. Instead of Devoto’s Spiral Scratch sneer, which felt studied and imitative, “Orgasm Addict” sported Shelley’s chirpy hiccup, a boyish and bracing new sound in punk.
Buzzcocks were the antidote to what was coined then as “punkismo”—four men who projected a new, more nuanced image of punk masculinity, even as Shelley extolled the compulsive joys of masturbation. In fact, it was because Shelley was singing such a juvenile anthem to jacking off that Buzzcocks felt so instantly fresh. What appeared to be yet another willfully offensive punk rant was in effect a stark admission of vulnerability. The song’s underlying message is subtle yet undeniable: Solitude can be turned on its side and harnessed as a liberating sexual energy. Buzzcocks had pioneered punk independence with the self-released Spiral Scratch, but “Orgasm Addict” was a different kind of DIY.
Shelley was born Peter McNeish in 1955, the son of working-class parents in Lancashire who made their living in the cotton mills and coal mines the industrial city was known for. With the nerdy audacity of a precocious blue-collar kid, he took his stage name from his favorite Romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley. Romanticism was not the hippest thing to reference in the iconoclastic British punk scene in the ’70s, nor was literature in any form. But as his fellow punks were assuming visceral or satirical pseudonyms like Strummer, Rotten, and Palmolive, Shelley reached back into his schoolbooks for a name that would later signify his soft and beating heart.
Singles Going Steady is festooned with love songs rendered urgent and rough by the thrust and distortion of punk. Shelley and company understood what few of their peers did: With love songs in the AOR arena growing increasingly cheesy throughout the ’70s, punk demanded a new rawness and credibility if it dared to address love. You can’t spell “romance” without “Ramone,” and it’s no accident that their music owes plenty to their New York counterparts. Buzzcocks, however, jettisoned Ramones’ biker image and campy horror for boy-next-door charm and the everyday concerns of the forlorn. “I won’t be nasty,” Shelley remarked to Melody Maker in 1978. “We’re just four nice lads, the kind of people you could take home to your parents.” Singles Going Steady didn’t weaponize punk with the goal of toppling the dominance of silly love songs in the ’70s; the album is as much Wings as it is Ramones, as sympathetic to Captain & Tennille’s “Love Will Keep Us Together” as it is to Joy Division’s “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”
Buzzcocks mastered that tension at the heart of the love song—the opposing forces of attraction and repulsion, of devotion and betrayal, the thin line between love and hate, for others and for oneself. Singles Going Steady stands as one of the most endearing, intimate, and impeccably crafted batch of earworms in either the love-song or punk-rock realm. After shedding the exhilarating brattiness of “Orgasm Addict,” Singles unleashes “What Do I Get?,” a plea for companionship that’s so free of pretense, it makes “Anarchy in the UK” sound as overblown as “Hotel California.”
“I just want a lover like any other/What do I get?/I only want a friend who will stay to the end/What do I get?” Shelley laments, his voice a dribble of honey over guitars that quiver and churn like a stomach full of butterflies. “I Don’t Mind,” “Love You More,” and “Promises” follow suit, expanding Shelley’s cosmology of anguish. Unrequited longing, severed ties, knock-kneed bashfulness, rash declarations of euphoric infatuation: Shelley delivers it all with jaunty melodies and deceptively complex chord progressions on par with the Beatles and the Kinks. And with “Harmony in My Head,” Shelley’s fellow guitarist and songwriting partner Steve Diggle makes his lone lead-vocal contribution to the record, lending a gruff warmth that serves as a counterpoint to Shelley’s choirboy voice.
The album’s latter half, which gathers the B-sides of these eight singles, is more diverse. From the hilariously bitter “Oh Shit!” to the celebration of punk for punk’s sake, “Noise Annoys,” Singles documents a band at play. Even the love songs, “Just Lust” and “Lipstick,” are lighter in tone—although the latter veers into heavy shadows as its lyrics skim Shelley’s increasingly philosophical take on romance: “When you miss me/In your dreams does my lover have your face?” Together, they’re no less tuneful or indelible than their A-side counterparts. Shelley refused to see punk as an insurrection against pop. It was simply a more efficient delivery system.
Love songs were Shelley’s own brand of post-punk, every bit as radical as PiL’s dissonant dub or Gang of Four’s abrasive funk. As he once told Melody Maker, “People have been saying things like, ‘Punk songs aren’t meant to be about love.’ I didn’t say that, so why should I abide by it?” Not that Buzzcocks were averse to dipping into some easily recognizable post-punk on Singles: “Why Can’t I Touch It?” is an atmospheric sprawl, six and a half minutes of dreamy yearning that evolves into a jagged interplay of riffs between Diggle and Shelley, a punk jam session comparable to the far more celebrated dual-guitar alchemy of their contemporaries Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd in Television.
The peak of Singles Going Steady—and of Buzzcocks’ legacy—is the hit British single “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve?).” Paraphrasing a Marlon Brando line from the musical Guys and Dolls, the droll title belies the song’s power. Guitars seethe and beats clench. Shelley sings like a man whose entire existence hangs by a single frayed nerve: “I can’t see much of a future/Unless we find out what’s to blame/What a shame,” he sings without a trace of hope, a lover cast adrift on the cruel winds of indifference. He picks mercilessly at his psychic scabs, his vulnerability as a songwriter is practically agonizing—even as it serves as a perverse source of strength.
“I actually do feel unguarded, and you see it as a joke. It isn’t me who should feel bad,” he said in 1978, in response to a perceived backlash against his sensitive-boy persona. “Ever Fallen in Love” is the apotheosis of that persona. It’s a tribute not only to the notion that punk can be a thoughtful expression of naked feeling, but to Buzzcocks’ idiosyncratic embrace of the finer points of classic pop songcraft. Shelley wasn’t only drawing from the likes of the Beatles, whose cover art for Let It Be is deliberately mirrored on Singles Going Steady; he was, by his own admission, just as envious of the music of the Supremes and Dusty Springfield.
That Diana Ross and Springfield are both icons of the LGBTQ community is not incidental. Shelley was British punk’s first openly bisexual star. He wrote “Love You More” about a woman he dated in 1975; he wrote “Ever Fallen in Love” about Francis Cookson, a man he lived with later in the ’70s while they played together in the side project the Tiller Boys. The clarity of Shelley’s sexual orientation was reflected, paradoxically, in the vagueness of his lyrics. His deft use of pronouns and perspectives made Buzzcocks songs almost entirely indeterminate when it came to the gender of the narrator—or the person at the other end. “I tried to be as gender neutral as possible in writing songs, because for me I could use the same song for either sex,” he once explained. He embraced the fluid sexuality and identity explored previously in a more fantastical fashion by his heroes Ray Davies, Lou Reed, and David Bowie. But Shelley applied that approach to achingly confessional songs that confronted the realities of love with both tenderness and heaviness.
“Our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thought,” wrote Percy Bysshe Shelley in his 1820 poem, “To a Skylark.” Inspired by the sight of the bird while strolling with his wife through the Italian countryside, the troubled Romantic writer spiraled into an epiphany—the understanding that pain and joy are inseparable, perhaps even co-dependent. It’s an evergreen idea, in which Pete Shelley found the immortality he sought. Pop-punk and indie rock from then on out—from the Smiths to Green Day to Radiohead to Fucked Up—would not sound remotely the same without Buzzcocks. And Singles Going Steady remains a painful, joyous record, one that makes the lungs quicken and the ribs vibrate with the exquisite heartbreak of it—the sweetest, saddest songs ever skylarked by a punk.
