This book is dedicated to my wife Mary and our five children, Michelle, Sarah, Paul, Tony and Méabh.
CONTENTS
1 TITLE PAGE
2 DEDICATION
3 AUTHOR’S NOTE
4 FOREWORD BY PETE SHELLEY
5 FOREWORD BY RICHARD BOON
6 INTRODUCTION
7 1966–1975
8 1976
9 1977
10 1978
11 1979–1981
12 1982–1988
13 1989–1995
14 1997–2017
15 DISCOGRAPHY
16 THE SECRET PUBLIC
17 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
18 PLATES
19 ABOUT THE AUTHOR
20 COPYRIGHT
For many Buzzcocks fans, the split in 1981 was the end, and for this reason the very thought of a reunion was belittled by many. Buzzcocks had made such a massive contribution to the pop world, and many people feared that the fond memories would be tainted by a substandard return. With this in mind, I have written their history in three distinct sections. The first is up to and including the original split, and is an in-depth chronology. The second section is from 1989 to 1996, spanning a period I have chosen to cover in the form of a gigography, which not only lists all their shows but also documents all recording activity under the various line-up changes. The third is an overview of what the band have done since then and includes their fortieth-anniversary celebrations.
The contents of this book are the result of more than four years’ research, using tour itineraries, personal diaries, radio and television contracts, session sheets and interviews with everyone involved with the band. The overviews are designed to give some degree of context for what Buzzcocks achieved, with the main text detailing these events in greater depth. In an attempt to maintain the accuracy of this book and the events recorded within it, some approximate dates have been extracted from comments made in interviews, such as ‘a few days later’. In this edition, many of these have been amended. However, 99.9 per cent of the dates are accurate and in every instance are totally factual.
This revised edition has been written with the full support and co-operation of the entire original line-up, Tony Barber and Phil Barker. Furthermore, original bassist Garth Davies has given me his first and only interview about his contribution and time with the band. These interviews took place between July and September 2016 and for the first time dispel much of the myth that has been written and said about him in the past. Today he plays bass guitar with Young Once, a band based in Tyldesley, Lancashire.
This revised update includes many corrections and additions that have been possible only today. A special word of thanks to Peter Hough, who wrote the overview for the years 1997–2016 and made it possible to bridge the gap that occurred in this revised edition. This book spans the band’s forty-year history – 1976–2016 – and more.
BY PETE SHELLY
Steve Diggle and I have often joked over the years that we’re ‘conscientious objectors to work’. I guess this book shows that, whatever we say, we’ve managed to pack in quite a lot over the forty-plus years that we have been entertaining friends.
Apart from a few years off, when we were doing other things, Buzzcocks have been pretty busy as a band. Playing music and making records is a huge part of it, of course, but, when it’s all put together like this, it’s a reminder – for us too – of all the organisation and work that it takes to get us to one place, then another, or into a studio to do what we do.
We’re not complaining. We’ve travelled the world again and again on this adventure and met brilliant people wherever we go. If you’ve picked up this book, you’re probably one of them.
Thank you for your support. Without you, all of this would have been kind of pointless.
BY RICHARD BOON
‘All good stories,’ my late father would say to little me, introducing bedtime tales, ‘start this way: Once upon a time …’ As does the tale here. But all stories are subject to different interpretations. Did it begin with Howard Trafford befriending me at school? With his befriending Peter McNeish at college? With the three of us being so engaged by a review of a band in New Musical Express by Neil Spencer that we spent a now mythologised ‘lost weekend’ seeing that band – the Sex Pistols – at High Wycombe and Welwyn Garden City, 20 and 21 February 1976, changing, challenging and occasionally ruining our lives as a result?
That’s as good a start as any to this story. Yet, as it unfolds, other players, in various roles, making different contributions, enter the narrative, each with their own voice, interpretation and memories. And, as we passively succumb to the silent invasion by a silicon-based life form by outsourcing our phone numbers, family and other photographs, and personal data to impersonal smart devices and cloud files, it’s those memories, from primary sources, that become more vital and valuable. As here, in this remixed, extended version of the story of a small group of people over a short period of time.
Richard Boon
Buzzcocks’ 1979 compilation Singles Going Steady is without doubt one of the greatest punk albums of all time. Released two years before the band split, it was a distillation of everything uncommonly endearing about the Mancunian punk pop quartet: their wit, their romanticism and their ability to play fast, sardonic and timeless New Wave tunes.
Sounds once said of them, ‘There’s no posing, no gobbing, no half-baked ideas of punkismo – just energy, presence and commitment. They sing because they have something to say.’ What the Buzzcocks said struck a chord with every teenager in the country. Indeed, the band – whose legendary debut EP Spiral Scratch was the first truly DIY punk record – were one of those glorious young groups that brought alive all the drama of the teenage-mag letters pages. Every track they ever recorded was a hormonally unstable youth anthem, simultaneously presenting the ups and downs of adolescent life. While other bands sang about high-society call girls, Buzzcocks were still celebrating the pleasures of a swift masturbatory indulgence. Even in 1979, when the Clash were cruising in their (borrowed) ‘Brand New Cadillac’, Pete Shelley and the boys were still waiting for a night bus to take them home.
Yet, though the characters who narrated Buzzcocks’ blistering punk pop