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KEEN to show that Buzzcocks had not lost touch with their roots after enjoying the most successful year of their musical career, Pete Shelley published the band’s August 1977-August 1978 accounts in the band’s Secret Public fan club magazine, showing that, in the year of “Ever Fallen In Love”, the greatest pop-punk band of all time made a mere £3,108. “When everyone’s making the kind of money people think is being made, we’ll probably not tell you,” he wrote.

A modest prophet, infinitely richer artistically than he ever was financially, the oddly inscrutable Shelley died suddenly in 2018, aged just 63, having left the account of his own life reasonably unclear. In Ever Fallen In Love: The Lost Buzzcocks Tapes, writer and sometime Buzzcocks merch lady Louie Shelley (no relation) strives to tell the singer’s story based on a series of interviews she did with him in 2012 and 2013, with a view to writing a song-by-song Buzzcocks guide. True to form, Shelley proved to be a funny, open interviewee while simultaneously not giving that much away.

Born in Leigh, Lancashire, Pete Shelley met Buzzcocks co-founder Howard Devoto while studying electronics and computer science at the Bolton Institute Of Technology, their shared interest in the nascent punk movement leading them to put on two Sex Pistols shows in Manchester, launching their own band’s career at the second one. Devoto left to form Magazine after the band’s gigantic independent EP single “Spiral Scratch”, leaving Shelley (and co-lead Steve Diggle) to become the ultimate bittersweet pop group. As Shelley says here: “I always like having happy music, even with wrist-slitting lyrics.”

Shelley’s ambiguous sexuality – he had both male and female partners – inspired him to re-invent the love song for a new age; his peerless string of 1978 A-sides were gender-free, stripped of cliché, and ended up being the foundation of all indie-pop thereafter. His secret formula? “It’s written in everyday language,” he explains of the mighty “What Do I Get?”. “It just happens to rhyme.”

However, while Buzzcocks were Top Of The Pops regulars, Shelley was an uncomfortable entertainer, and the band’s much-loved 1978 LPs Another Music In A Different Kitchen and Love Bites were (these interviews suggest) rush jobs concocted from old material. In artistic terms, they peaked with 1979’s bleak A Different Kind Of Tension, by which time Shelley concedes the band were barely speaking and “there were a lot of mind-altering substances being taken”. Even with interesting asides and footnotes from former bandmates Steve Garvey and John Maher, Ever Fallen In Love feels a little insubstantial, but given his natural reticence, this is probably as close as anyone was going to get to really understanding Pete Shelley. Credit where it’s due.

Pete Shelley in 1978:a man of contradictions

FIN COSTELLO/REDFERNS

BUZZCOCKS were one of the many bands that Police manager and indie Svengali Miles Copeland took a chance on when “no US record company was interested”, his IRS label shifting 25,000 copies of the Singles Going Steady greatest hits LP at a time when American major labels’ idea of edgy ‘new wave’ was Tom Petty And The Heartbreakers. In Two Steps Forward, One Step Back, Copeland explains how he invented Wishbone Ash, discovered Squeeze, and then took The GoGos and The Bangles to the top of the US charts, helped by the conservatism of the major labels and a uniquely Thatcherite take on punk rock. As he puts it, “The most important message was that the music business, and the punks specifically, were all about ‘free enterprise’.”

By 1979, the Buzzcocks were barely speaking

Copeland’s own tastes were fairly vanilla, but his entrepreneurial instincts helped him to make Sting a superstar and launch REM towards the big time (despite considering them “boring”). Two Steps Forward shows how bottom-line cynicism and a nose for hits took him places. Those take-home quotes: “People are shit,” and “if you want loyalty, get a dog.”

THE family dog comes along for the ride in Kristin Hersh’s daunting Seeing Sideways, which tracks the sometime Throwing Muse’s ongoing battle for pop survival through her life with her four sons. “Each boy gave maybe 10 years of his life to the road,” she writes, having home-schooled her children in the back of the van as she stuck to her guns in the slow lane of the pop industry.

Her fragile mental health and battles for custody of her eldest son overshadowed the earliest years of her career, while Hersh’s disaffection with the music business grew while she was pregnant with her second child, half-naked photo shoots an annoying irrelevance as she struggled with childcare and morning sickness. Elsewhere, she gets teargassed after blundering into a football riot in Belgium, and her family home is destroyed while she is away on tour.

Seeing Sideways features adorable children and cuddly animals, but at its heart is a bleak depiction of what Hersh put herself through to keep her family, her art and her independence. “Songs and babies are the same,” she writes. “They grow themselves if I keep them safe and don’t get in their way.” A simple proposition on paper, but brutal, precarious work in practice.

JIM WIRTH

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