The gentle voice that once sang the most devastating love song of the punk era fell silent forever on a frozen December morning in Tallinn, Estonia, 1,500 miles from the coal town where he began. Pete Shelley, the bespectacled 63-year-old who co-founded the Buzzcocks and wrote “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve),” was found dead in his bed on December 6, 2018, in the medieval Baltic city he had called home since 2012. The news crossed the North Sea like a shockwave, and grown men who had built entire lives on three minutes of his music wept without fully understanding why.
Born Peter Campbell McNeish on April 17, 1955, in Leigh, a Lancashire town built on coal and cotton, Shelley was never meant for the mines. His father John worked as a fitter at Ashley Green Colliery, spending half his life underground among the cages. His mother Margaret had worked the mills before marriage.
The family lived on a terrace street in chapel-going respectability, the living embodiment of working-class England. But the boy at the center of it all did not fit the shape the town had cut for him.
At Leigh Grammar School, Shelley was hopeless at English literature, the subject that would one day make his poetic name. He was happiest when left alone with a soldering iron. While other Lancashire teenagers formed earnest blues bands, McNeish built his own oscillators and fed them into a four-track reel-to-reel recorder in his bedroom.
In March 1974, two full years before punk had a name, he committed an entire album of squealing alien electronic noise to tape and titled it “Sky Yen.” He also fronted a glam outfit called Jets of Air, all feather boas and borrowed Bowie.
This rather gives the lie to the idea that the future Pete Shelley sprang fully formed from punk’s year zero. He was, in fact, a gentle and unassuming boy, quick to laugh and quicker still to vanish into a circuit diagram, already half aware that he was not built quite like the other lads in Leigh. Long before anyone was watching, he had been rehearsing strangeness.
In 1975, Shelley enrolled at the Bolton Institute of Technology and was attracted inevitably to the Electronic Music Society, where he found the only other person in the building who spoke his particular cultural dialect. Howard Trafford had pinned a notice to a college wall seeking collaborators to perform “Sister Ray,” the most punishing 20 minutes the Velvet Underground ever put on vinyl. McNeish answered it.
They made an odd couple. Trafford was severe, cerebral, and faintly menacing. McNeish was warm, impish, and perpetually amused.
When the time came to reinvent themselves, they did it with a flourish of bookishness. Trafford became Howard Devoto. McNeish became Pete Shelley, after the romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, though he took mischievous pleasure for years in muddying the provenance.
“I always used to deny it was the poet and say it was Shelley Winters,” he said, “but I saw her on a chat show and she said her name was originally Shirley and she changed it in honor of the poet.” The deeper truth was tender than either version he offered. Shelley was the name his parents had held in reserve for the daughter who never arrived.
For his stage self, he chose the girl he might have been.
In February 1976, the two of them read a single incendiary paragraph in the NME in which Sex Pistols guitarist Steve Jones declared, “Actually, we’re not into music. We’re into chaos.” It was a clarion call.
They borrowed a car, drove down to London, and went looking for the source. They found Malcolm McLaren behind the till of his shop and the Sex Pistols up on a stage, and what they witnessed rearranged their internal chemistry on the spot. Back home, they assembled a band that same month and went hunting for a name.
They found it in the listings magazine Time Out, in a headline over a review of the television series Rock Follies. “It’s the buzz.” The buzz was the livewire thrill of the stage.
In the local vernacular of Lancashire, “buzz” simply meant mate or friend, and the sniggering second meaning was sharpened by the fact that Shelley had lately been earning his keep behind the counter of a Bolton sex shop. Buzzcocks, one word, no definite article. Obscene and matey in the very same breath, which was exactly what they were going for.
Manchester had no punk venue, so Shelley and Devoto simply built one for an evening, paying 32 pounds to hire the Lesser Free Trade Hall and persuading McLaren to send the Sex Pistols up the motorway. The first show on June 4, 1976, was meant to be the Buzzcocks’ own live debut, but their rhythm section evaporated days beforehand, leaving the two founders to watch from the floor. They returned properly equipped on July 20, 1976, and finally played in earnest.
The crowd at those two gigs numbered perhaps a hundred at the very most, yet it has since acquired the status of a sacred census.
Somewhere in that room, by various accounts, sat the embryonic forms of Joy Division, New Order, the Smiths, the Fall, Magazine, and Simply Red, alongside the future impresarios Tony Wilson and Martin Hannett. Nearly every one of them was about to walk home and start something of their own. Tickets had cost 50 pence.
The NME would later anoint the June date the most important concert of all time. Pete Shelley had organized it himself, in the casual way another man might book the church hall for a jumble sale.
The autumn of 1976 was pure chaos, exactly the kind Steve Jones had promised. The Buzzcocks were swept up onto the Sex Pistols’ Anarchy in the UK tour, a doomed nationwide caravan of punk’s first eruption. Gigs were cancelled by panicking town councils.
Hotel managers turned the bands away at the door. The tabloids worked themselves into a froth of moral hysteria after the Pistols swore on live tea-time television. Most of the dates were scrapped before anyone could play them.
For two students from Bolton, it was a crash course in the speed at which the world could change its mind.
By Christmas, they had recruited a drummer, John Maher, found through the back pages of Melody Maker, and a fierce determination to put out a record entirely on their own terms. No label in Manchester would have them, so Shelley borrowed 500 pounds from his colliery fitter father. On December 28, 1976, the band cut four songs as live in a matter of hours at Indigo Sound Studio, a young and entirely unknown engineer named Martin Hannett working the desk under the alias Martin Zero.
The result, “Spiral Scratch,” released in late January 1977 on their own New Hormones imprint, was the first do-it-yourself record of the punk era and more or less the founding charter of the independent music industry that grew up in its wake. Within a couple of years, tiny labels were sprouting across Britain in direct imitation. Factory and Rough Trade and a hundred others, every one of them tracing its license back to a four-song single funded out of a Lancashire fitter’s savings.
It contained “Boredom,” whose guitar solo, two notes struck with magnificent contempt some 66 times in a row, remains the purest expression of punk’s anti-virtuoso creed ever pressed into plastic. It was perfection at the first attempt. The initial run of a thousand copies sold out at once.
It would eventually shift 16,000 and inspire a whole generation to do likewise. And then, barely three weeks after lighting the fuse, Howard Devoto stunned everyone by walking away from the thing he had helped to invent.
“I don’t like movements,” he announced. “What was once unhealthily fresh is now a clean old hat.” He went back to college, then formed the artier Magazine, and bequeathed the band, the songwriting, and the microphone to his shy friend from the electronic society.
Pete Shelley was now in the driving seat. Steve Diggle moved across from bass to guitar. The major labels that had ignored Manchester for the better part of a year suddenly arrived in a feeding frenzy.
On August 16, 1977, the very day Elvis Presley died in Memphis, the Buzzcocks signed to United Artists at the Electric Circus.
Shelley, who had not the slightest intention of becoming anyone’s domesticated punk acquisition, devised an elegant little loyalty test for his suitors. He simply told them the next single would be called “Orgasm Addict.” “Most people’s interests just seem to dissolve after that,” he remembered.
“They thought, ‘We’ll never get this played on the radio.’” Exactly one man, United Artists A&R chief Andrew Lauder, declined to blink, and so Lauder got the band.
“Orgasm Addict,” released that October and produced by Martin Rushent, proved every bit as unbroadcastable as its title promised. It is two minutes of gleeful, riotous filth about compulsive masturbation
