THE MUCH-LOVED PUNK-POPSTERS ARE BACK WITH A NEW ALBUM AND TOUR. MARK PAYTRESS WATCHES AND LISTENS
Back in 1978, Pete Shelley’s nostalgia "for an age yet to come" ("Nostalgia", on "Love Bites") caught rock music in an uncharacteristic forward-looking mode. The Buzzcocks were delivering
octane-charged, punk-approved pop into the charts, while all over the country, people were sectioning off their record collections into pre- and post-punk categories. Forays into the former
bundle became increasingly rare as almost every week brought with it a clutch of records (usually on 7") that demanded constant turntable attention. With that sort of buzz, which was shared in crammed, back-street record shops and unlikely concert venues, it's impossible not to romanticise the era as one when the only possible nostalgia could be for the future.
Tuesday 18th May 1993: Pete Shelley and guitarist Steve Diggle are hunched over some concrete steps outside Guildford Civic Hall. It's the early stages of the reformed Buzzcocks
35-date tour, and a bubbly Shelley has just exclaimed that it never was the group's intention to become a living museum, a national treasure. The words "But you are!" spontaneously
gush out, echoing the sentiments of a generation brought up on one of the best run of pop singles since the days of Bolan, even the Beatles and Stones.
Shelley and Diggle both agree that the Buzzcocks played - and continue to play - what's now referred to as 'timeless pop', a phrase which has become something of a catch-all for any three-minute melody that brings with it twinges of a safely tucked-away youth. But many who take great pleasure sticking on "Singles Going Steady" every once in a while have a problem with the notion that the Buzzcocks are back. I mean, you don't mind meeting up with an old partner once in a while, but you probably wouldn't want to go to bed with them again.
The Buzzcocks don't quite see it that way. They're still making music that refreshes and sparkles in much the same way it did back in '78 - in fact, if history was a ball of confetti that you could throw into the air and reassemble in a different order, you might easily imagine that their new album, "Trade Test Transmissions", was their 1979 follow-up to "Love Bites".
Shelley and Diggle are still at the helm, as they were back then, now ably assisted by two London-based musicians, Tony Arber (bass) and Phil Barker (drums). Original bassist
Steve Garvey is a family man in New York, while ex-drummer John Maher is, according to Shelley, unable to commit himself when the sun shines because his greatest love is motor-racing. Any whiff of an inauthentic revival, though, is quickly swept away by the new record. It's classic Buzzcocks, through and through: direct, high-powered songs, with neat guitar fills, those unmistakeable "woaahh" backing vocals, and evocative track titles such as "Innocent", "Who'll Help Me Forget?" and "Palm Of Your Hand". As Steve Diggle sings on "Isolation", he "can't escape from what he knows".
Neither can we, the mistrustful rock audience who (even at 'Record Collector'!) regard reunions, reformations and general retro conviviality as misguided at best, sickening at worst. And Pete Shelley understands it too: "There's an obvious prejudice about bands getting back together," says one of the most famous voices in punk rock. "There are lots of bands I like that, if they got back together, I wouldn't even go and see the concert. Because personally I don't need that reinforcement of my past."
TENSION
Throughout the interview, there's a tension between the very real knowledge that the Buzzcocks are happening now, and the fact that their music is representative of something that happened way back when. Pete Shelley's justification comes two-fold. The Buzzcocks are in "that 1 % of bands who aren't going to short-change people by playing slow, shoddy versions of their past hits” he says, a comment that's certainly backed up by their performance later that evening. Secondly, he equates the 'ice cream doesn't taste as good as it used to' thesis with what the band were up against first time round: "That's just the other side of the coin of those who say, 'that's not really music'," he insists. "There's always a backlash to change."
So the age yet to come has arrived and brought with it a new take on nostalgia. What neither Shelley nor Diggle mention is the fact that writers like Dickens and Tolkien can have their work reissued without the batting of an eyelid; and no-one ever questions retrospectives of artists like Warhol and Matisse. Pop, though, has never quite lost its quest for novelty, or its obsession with youth, which leaves bands like the reformed Buzzcocks in a difficult position.
The record companies may have sustained themselves through an ever-larger diet of reissues during the past decade, but when it comes to an old act doing something new, they're not always so keen, as Pete Shelley explains: ''We tried unsuccessfully on several occasions to obtain a record deal. But unless you can ship hundreds of thousands of units, they won't give you the time of day. So it's good at the moment that we've got a record company interested in music again. It's a breath of fresh air."
Steve Diggle is equally enthusiastic about the deal with Castle/Essential, a label which has built its empire on the collectors/reissue market. "A lot of the people at Castle are Buzzcocks fans anyway, and they have a passion in terms of the way they deal with it. At the big companies, it's so much more impersonal. We told the majors, 'Look, we've been touring for three years, there are people out there wanting to buy the records.' They didn't want to know." (The group intend to
frame a rejection note from one major label A&R man who replied along the lines of "the Buzzcocks were one of my main inspirations, and so I was saddened by the news that they've got back together..." "He can piss off as far as I'm concerned," says an aggrieved Shelley.)
It's taken four years since the band's original reformation to get the album out, although there has been one EP, "Alive Tonight", issued in 1991 on Planet Pacific. Being without a record deal hasn't unduly bothered the group members, who still get nervous before they walk out on stage. But the ball was set in motion very much by accident. Steve Diggle was fronting Flag Of
Convenience, who arrived for some French dates one day to discover that the posters stated Buzzcocks FOC. Diggle retained the name. "I suppose it put us back in communication," Shelley remembers with a wry grin. "It did kick everything off," he continues," and Ian Copeland, who used to promote the Buzzcocks' U.S. tours, called asking why we hadn't been in touch with him.
Our manager told him that we weren't strictly back together yet, but asked him what kind of tour he would put on if we were. We were all interested in doing this tour in America – it seemed like a good idea, though little did we know that we'd still be flogging away at it now." Both Steve Garvey and John Maher played on that tour, though apart from the odd guest appearance, neither has much to do with the 90s Buzzcocks.
Although both Shelley and Diggle had pursued quite differing musical avenues throughout much of the 80s, they decided that a Buzzcocks reformation should actually sound like a Buzzcocks reformation, and not cheat themselves and their audiences by touting another music in a familiar name. “If a band chops and changes styles like the seasons," argues Pete Shelley, "they'll forget where they come from and they'll end up being rootless. It's always good to have that thread of continuity. The Buzzcocks is a story about four people who make music."
And two of those are quite different people to the ones who were there first time round. However, talk to Tony Arber and you'll soon realise that the new faces aren't disinterested
session players drafted in just to make up the numbers. "I've got scrapbooks at home full of
Buzzcocks stuff," exclaims the bassist with the vaguely Johnny Rotten demeanour. "I'm the oddball who's got all the one-sided 12" test pressings! There's nothing in your old Buzzcocks article that I haven't got." Arber first saw the group on the 'Another Music' tour when he was 14.
"I'd met Pete a few times at gigs over the years, bumped into him when the band got back together, and got pissed with him. Then I heard they were looking for a new bass player. When I finally got through to their manager, he said, 'That's the bloke we've been looking for!' It turned out he'd been trying to get hold of me for a couple of months.
"They'd been auditioning for while in Manchester and London, but I went down there and said, 'Right, which ones of the 57 are we playing?' They'd forgotten half of them and I had to teach them how they went!"
Arber missed the band's first major U.K. show at Reading in 1990, but caught them at the T&C. "They were tighter and better than they were first time round. They used to be pretty sloppy. I remember them stopping halfway through songs, and Pete would go, 'No, let's start that one again'!
"I've got no problem playing with this band at all. We've had a great response. In Ireland the other day, some people came up to us and said, 'When we saw the posters, we thought it was gonna be crap.' 20 year olds come up and say that it's a lot faster that they thought it would be. They expected a load of fat old geezers. You know, a lot of new bands would have a lot of trouble keeping up with this band, especially Diggle - he's a bit of a wild man!"
Arber, who brought his mate Phil Barker along as drummer, has something of a history himself. "Me and Philip were in Lack Of Knowledge, who released the third but last single on the Crass label. I was 16, Phil was 14." Lack Of Knowledge also issued an album through Crass, plus singles for their own label and with Chainsaw. After spells as guitarist with Rubella Ballet and session player/co-producer on Daniel Drummond's album, Tony started a club in Camden. "The club was in a tiny room and held around 100 people at a squeeze. I made all these different rules: I refused to accept demo tapes, but every band got paid. I lost loads of money, but the bands enjoyed it. My Bloody Valentine, who'd just got back from Berlin, played there several weeks running."
Arber and Barker backed Slaughter Joe (Foster) on his two solo albums, before Tony got sidetracked with experimental outfit Ear Trumpet. "After that, I joined Boys Wonder, who've now become Corduroy. I always wondered what it would be like to be in a group on a major label, but when I did it, it was enough to make me give up playing music, which is virtually what I did. Until the chance to play with the Buzzcocks turned up.
"People must think Pete and Steve tell us, these two 'other blokes', what to do, that they travel in a separate limo. But it's not like that at all. You should see us arguing after some gigs when we're pissed in a hotel bar. You'll soon see that it's a group effort!"
READY-MADE
"Tony was a fan already," says Shelley, "and had put himself up to our manager for an audition. We'd already been billed for 'NME's 'Viva Eight' concert last September, and needed to sort out a regular rhythm section pretty quick. So he got his trusty sidekick Phil and they came down together.' Because they both knew the songs, it was an easy decision. It saved us having to teach the entire Buzzcocks methodology - it was ready-made!"
An almost unnatural enthusiasm runs through the entire group, as Steve Diggle explains. "There's definitely a new feel to the band. It's like a first album in many ways. That old Buzzcocks piece of history feels like someone else in a way. You have to approach it as a bloke in his 30s, though. You can't really be 16 again."
And so what about the oft-cited 'timeless pop'? "It still proves to be timeless pop," says Pete Shelley. "Look at the fans at the front of the stage. We write songs about the greatest thing in the world, which is real life, and the way in which it affects us in a personal way. And that's what you find with any friend, isn't it? They appreciate the small things in life as being important, rather than the big issues."
Regard the Buzzcocks as the Frank Sinatras of the punk rock scene at your peril. There are no hairpieces, faltering movements or the ghost of a past technical skill. Not that the group really care, anyway. After all, they kicked off their career with an acute recognition of the ephemeral nature of the pop beast, singing "I'm already a has-been" on "Breakdown".
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