The man at the heart of punk: the late Pete Shelley recalls his Buzzcocks years

Manchester, in the words of the artist Linder Sterling, is a ‘tiny little world’. Nearly three million people live in its sprawl, but its centre is compact. Like-minded Mancunians have always found one another easily. Cultural life is febrile, which partly explains how, in the pre-digital late-20th century, England’s third city produced such startling bands: Joy Division, the Fall, New Order, the Smiths, the Happy Mondays and Tony Wilson’s era-defining Factory record label — and Buzzcocks, less celebrated, but without whom Manchester’s creative energy would have failed to detonate.

Pete Shelley was Buzzcocks’s charismatic co-founder and chief songwriter, whose sharp lyrics and bratty vocals shaped much of British punk. He died in 2018 without leaving a memoir, though he would have written an excellent one: he was erudite and well-read. But he did record interviews with his friend Louie Shelley (she is no relation — Pete was born Peter McNeish, Shelley was his stage name). Louie has published a short text and the interviews verbatim in Ever Fallen in Love, which focuses on the band’s ‘blistering years’ between 1975 and 1981.

This is fan writing: instinctive, not overly analytical. Louie is a Buzzcocks obsessive; her commentary is straightforward and the interviews friendly. Unlike much modern music writing, there are no quasi-academic treatises or earnest explanations of why Buzzcocks ‘matters’. This is punk — of course it matters. Her enthusiasm and rigour are her strengths.

In the late 1970s Buzzcocks made three albums and a few standalone singles, what Louie calls ‘divine pop delicacies’ — urgent, witty tracks with power-pop chords and ‘sudden endings to frighten DJs’. Spiral Scratch, their first EP, released in January 1977, was one of the earliest British punk records and pioneered independent record labels, pre-dating Factory.

Working-class, academic-leaning bands with little money were resourceful (Shelley and co-founder Howard Devoto were grammar-school and FE-college products).