The Green Room Podcast from Spectator USA: What do we get? Pete Shelley of Buzzcocks

Two poets named Shelley have graced the English language. One was Percy, and the other is Pete. Just as an intellectual is someone who can hear the William Tell Overture without thinking of the Lone Ranger, so a true lover of a three-minute pop song is someone who, hearing the words ‘Shelley’ and ‘Manchester’, thinks not of ‘The Masque of Anarchy’ and the Peterloo Massacre, but of ‘What Do I Get?’. ‘Ever Fallen In Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have)?’, ‘I Don’t Mind’, and the dozens of other songs that Pete Shelley wrote and sang with Buzzcocks.

I took lessons in rhythm guitar from Buzzcocks by playing along to Singles Going Steady, but I still can’t busk my way through some of Shelley’s chord sequences. They’re entirely unique and, like all great art, they express their own internal logic. One of the surprises in this week’s podcast is that Shelley, as a student in Bolton in the mid-Seventies, had bought an old gramophone and some 78s to play on it.