Читать книгу Buzzcocks - The Complete History - Tony McGartland - Страница 9

Long before Buzzcocks formed in 1976, there were no romantic pseudonyms or ultra-sharp punk-pop songs like ‘What Do I Get?’ and ‘Everybody’s Happy Nowadays’, neatly redefining the borders along which wit and fast guitars collided – all that was half a decade and an inspirational gig by the legendary Sex Pistols away. Instead, there was just a quartet of northern grammar-school boys, with very ordinary names like Peter McNeish, Howard Trafford, Steve Diggle and Garth Davies, who shared an interest in late-sixties American garage bands like the Velvet Underground and Stooges, and the wired, groundbreaking, homegrown sounds of Bolan, Bowie and, of course, the Beatles.

As with most of the other youngsters who made their name with the New Wave, their road to success was pitted with all kinds of embarrassing escapades, including the obligatory stints in dodgy sixth-form cover bands and earnest no-hoper rock outfits. As early as 1966, and one step ahead of everyone, an eleven-year-old Garth Davies from Tyldesley had ambitions of becoming a pop star. By 1972 he had joined his first band, Solid Gold. As he moved from rhythm guitar to bass guitar, his knowledge of music and ability to play meant he was in demand. For, by the following year, schoolfriend Peter McNeish had invited Garth around to his house and together they formed their first band, White Light.

In retrospect, Peter McNeish – soon to be known to the world as Pete Shelley – enjoyed a pre-punk history less cringeworthy than that of many of his contemporaries, but there are certain moments that are probably best forgotten. It’s hard to imagine that Shelley would want anyone to hear the home recordings of the 1973 teenage bluster of his rock group, who by now had changed the name of the band to Jets of Air. The same would also be true of Howard Trafford’s (later ‘Devoto’) piano playing with the fleeting Ernest Band.

But, without these teenage experiences, it’s unlikely that Shelley and Devoto would have been ready to realise their own punk vision after witnessing the bruising and chaotic onslaught of the Sex Pistols at two early 1976 gigs in London. Indeed, some of the Buzzcocks’ debut album material had already been road-tested by Jets of Air, who played slower but nonetheless recognisable versions of ‘Love You More’, ‘Nostalgia’ and ‘Sixteen Again’. More curious still, Pete Shelley’s classic, electro, eighties, synth-pop solo track, ‘Homosapien’, dated from 1974.

Indeed, the mid-seventies music scene shaped the New Wave much more than was ever credited at the time. In the years since punk, a myth has prevailed that the period between 1970 and 1975 was artistically barren, yielding little else but the interminable wailing of ten-minute Led Zeppelin-style guitar solos and rambling rock operas. There’s an element of truth in that, but a trip to the reissue section of any record shop reveals a very different story.

True, punk was born out of a frustration with manufactured teen groups such as the Bay City Rollers, as well as with Mercury and RAK’s roster of ageing, consumer-friendly pop’n’roll outfits like Suzie Quatro, Mud, Showaddywaddy, the Rubettes and Smokie. Things weren’t too hot at the ‘serious’ end of rock, either, with the Who and Led Zeppelin losing their early majesty through years of chemical indulgence, and progressive rockers like Genesis, Mike Oldfield and the post-Syd Barrett Pink Floyd abandoning themselves to pseudo-symphonic masturbatory hell. Stateside, too, the music biz seemed to be stranded, as cocaine-fuelled record company moguls fawned over pompous, self-indulgent album-oriented rock acts such as Grateful Dead and the dreaded Jefferson Starship.

In retrospect, these stultifying elements of the music scene were all symptoms of a much larger malaise – the much-talked-about seventies hangover from the heady days of sixties counterculture, when no one was worried about the price of too much free love and dodgy brown acid. This knowledge somehow made it all seem worse.

But the early seventies wasn’t all bad – far from it, in fact. As teenagers, Pete Shelley, Howard Devoto and Steve Diggle existed at a time when pop music was more varied and inspiring than it would be again for several years to come. Weaving in and out of the studied tedium of the tight-trousered end of rock were those two great Bohemians of Britpop, Marc Bolan and David Bowie, both of whom had survived the late sixties to make a string of original, glamorous and wonderfully idiosyncratic rock albums, blurring their sexual identity and glittering themselves up along the way. With Bolan, Bowie and their friends Roxy Music, Sweet and even Slade, rock’n’roll suddenly became theatre, and everyone waited for the next costume change with bated breath.

Equally dramatic was the early-seventies Kraut Rock scene, which centred on a collection of German avant-garde artists who crafted the kind of quirky, synthesised soundscapes later to influence Bowie’s Heroes and Low albums from 1976 and 1977 respectively. Groups like Can, Faust and Tangerine Dream – and to a lesser extent the solemn, monolithic industrialists Kraftwerk – revolutionised the role of the synthesiser, and made challenging, often discordant music that flew in the face of traditional rock structures. Kraftwerk took anti-rock notions a step further, using the synthesiser’s austere sounds to articulate a sense of coolness and detachment, hinting at emotionally stark future worlds. Evidently, Pete Shelley was a fan, as in 1974 he recorded various doomy electronic sounds in the front room of his home, which later appeared on his 1981 solo record Sky Yen. His first proper solo LP, 1981’s Homosapien, was highly technology-oriented, too.

More immediately relevant to punk, though, was the intense renewal of interest during the period in back-to-basics rock’n’roll, especially on the underground London music scene. As early as 1969, musicians who’d become famous in the sixties were expressing a desire to return to the simple R&B and rockabilly sounds that had inspired them to pick up guitars in the first place. Chief among these were the Beatles, who even planned to release an album called Get Back, which would be heavily indebted to the vintage twelve-bar music of their heroes Chuck Berry, Little Richard and Elvis. In the event, it didn’t happen (though the title-track escaped as a single), but it was indicative of a prevailing notion shared by bands as diverse as the Kinks and Procol Harum that nothing beat a bit of old-style boogie.

With the advent of rock operas like Tommy, and bloated, self-indulgent progressive rock, more people decided to ‘get back’, and, by 1974, bands like Dr. Feelgood, the Count Bishops and the 101ers had started playing a thrashy, supercharged version of old-fashioned rock’n’roll in pubs in and around London. This, of course, was the great pub rock, a much-maligned beast whose proponents included early incarnations of the Damned (then Johnny Moped), the Vibrators and, in spirit if not in style, the Stranglers. The lead singer of the 101ers was one John Mellor, better known as Joe Strummer, who played the dirtiest, tinniest, most amateur three-chord thrash most people had ever witnessed – and at deafening volume, too. He was the son of a British ambassador, who’d been an envoy to Turkey and Mexico, but you’d never have guessed it from Joe’s strange, slurring voice and salt-of-the-earth manner. When the other future Clash founders, Mick Jones and bassist Paul Simonon, saw the 101ers live, they knew Joe was the man to front their own Mod-rock group.

Yet, although pub rock, glam and the leftover spirit of sixties radicalism turbocharged punk, and the dull, boring, indulgent stadium rock of Genesis and Boston afforded it a vacuum in which it could thrive, the New Wave was most directly inspired by something else: the New York punk scene of 1974–5.

A 1975 NME feature gave the first exciting snapshot of a city in which a bunch of gawky, bubblegum-chewing long-hairs were playing a brand of brash, beefy garage rock, which had all the passion and attitude of the Yardbirds, the Stones and the Kinks in the mid-sixties. It was young, it was gormless, it was loud and it said ‘Fuck you!’. And the key players were the New York Dolls, the Stilettos (with Debbie Harry of Blondie), Television, Talking Heads and the Ramones, with the eye of the hurricane usually being the CBGB club. Overshadowing the whole scene, though, was the spectre of Iggy Pop’s band, the Stooges, who, together with the MC5 from Detroit, had closed the sixties with a thunderous, misanthropic and menacing take on rock, the perfect antidote to wide-eyed hippie idealism and sophisticated pop. A veteran of several mental institutions, Iggy Pop was the coolest, skinniest and most slack-jawed ‘punk’ on the block, and his was the attitude – self-laceration was a favourite – that prompted the word ‘punk’ (meaning worthless trash) to be applied to the scene.

Godfathers of punk the Stooges and the MC5, and the fastest of their young charges, the Ramones, had a particularly profound impact on the British scene, with all three inspiring in varying degrees the Pistols, the Clash, the Damned and, yes, Buzzcocks (a very early incarnation of which covered Iggy’s ‘Your Pretty Face Has Gone To Hell’). Indeed, Buzzcocks couldn’t have existed without what had gone before, self-consciously pinching their sixty-mile-an-hour tempos from the Ramones, their sneers from the Pistols and their art-school swagger from the Velvet Underground.

But those brilliant songs, which were already being written by Pete McNeish when he was working as a computer operator in the mid-seventies – well, they were all their very own. Armed with experience, ideas and the desire to be the greatest, wittiest, most romantic punk-pop band in the world, young Peter McNeish and Howard Trafford stumbled through the early months of 1976 knowing that the British music scene was about to blow up in the nation’s face.