MAGAZINE

Post-punk pioneers turned new wave outliers, MAGAZINE never quite fulfilled their commercial potential. As their back catalogue is reissued, frontman HOWARD DEVOTO – aka “the most important man alive” – along with former bandmates and acolytes reflect on their brilliant but doomed trajectory. “Some sort of sky might’ve been the limit,” Devoto reflects to Dave Simpson. “But how could I possibly know unless I tried?”

Magazine in 1978: (l–r) John McGeoch, Martin Jackson, Howard Devoto, Barry Adamson and Dave Formula

Photo by ADRIAN BOOT/URBANIMAGE.TV

OCTOBER 2, 1977 was an inauspicious date for Manchester’s Electric Circus. A key venue for punk – the Sex Pistols, The Clash, Siouxsie & The Banshees and The Damned had all played there, among others – it had fallen foul of the city council and was now closing. For its final night, the promoters intended to give the Electric Circus a memorable send-off, lining up local bands the Drones, Slaughter And The Dogs, The Worst and – only a few months away from changing their name to Joy Division –Warsaw. But there was one other, unannounced addition to the bill – a new band, making their live debut. This was Magazine, a compelling and innovative project from former Buzzcock Howard Devoto.

“The setlist was only three songs, ‘Shot By Both Sides’, ‘The Light Pours Out Of Me’ and ‘I Love You, You Big Dummy’,” says Devoto today. Two originals and a Captain Beefheart song Devoto had been covering since Buzzcocks’ earliest demos, these were enough to make an impact. They were signed by Virgin Records days later.

“We were well received, as we were at Rafters, Belle Vue and those other 1977 gigs.”

“At those early shows it almost felt like Howard was stepping out into the audience and saying to them, ‘I’ll kill you’,” says Barry Adamson. “It was a weird standpoint of audience confrontation, which is punk, for want of a better word, but at the same time it wasn’t. It was fascinating to watch this man on a sort of invisible high wire. I could feel the power of that. After we supported The Clash in Belle Vue, Mick Jones from The Clash came up to me and said, ‘Fucking hell, that was brilliant.’”

Definitive days: Jackson, Devoto and Adamson on stage in 1977

GUS STEWART/REDFERNS

In the audience at the Electric Circus was The Fall guitarist Martin Bramah, who remembers Magazine’s brief but impactful performance that night as “a stunning, game-changing debut for all of us watching. It was above and beyond anything we’d heard from Buzzcocks.”

Buzzcocks had been in punk’s advance party with their frenetic originals (“Boredom”, “Time’s Up”, “Orgasm Addict”, “Breakdown” and several others), but Devoto had a different agenda for Magazine. Placing an ad for new bandmates in the Manchester branch of Virgin Records, Devoto made his intentions clear from the start: “Punk mentality not essential.” Inspired as much by Dostoevsky and Camus as Bowie’s Low and Iggy’s The Idiot, Magazine would look beyond the fast thrills of ’77, with John McGeoch’s swashbuckling guitar-playing, Barry Adamson’s supine bass and Dave Formula’s rich, textured keyboards adding much to Devoto’s intellectual, inscrutable, literary, sexual, sardonic lyrics. “For me, Magazine were the first real post-punk band,” says Simple Minds’ Jim Kerr, who first saw Magazine in 1978 in Glasgow and says the impact never left him. “There was – and I say this with some trepidation – almost a prog rock side. Howard’s lyrics were cerebral. They had keyboards, which hardly any punk bands had then. They broke all those rules and nobody sounded like Magazine before Magazine. They were the soil from which so many of us grew.”