Tag: Buzzcocks

He was hardly the first punk rocker to leave us, but he played guitar on the first (and arguably the best) indie punk 7″, Spiral Scratch by The Buzzcocks. I thought he was a wonderful songwriter: there was a time when I thought he was the best songwriter. Another Music in a Different Kitchen was constantly on my turntable when I was 19, and I thought of Pete Shelley as a friend, though he had no idea who I was… but in a way he did. I knew because of his songs that he was on some deep level like me.

When I found out he was queer a couple of years later, I better understood the connection. But that connection was about more than our both being a particular kind of different. He was a romantic and a depressive. He was smart. He made the kind of records I wanted to make.

And today, I was working on a blog post about how we treat celebrities when they die, and at just the moment when I was ready to publish it, I checked Facebook, because that’s what I do. The first thing I saw was that he’d died. Considering the subject of what I’d just been working on, it felt like something I had to write about: both because it seemed relevant and because of how much his music meant to me in a dark period of my life.

There was a time when the only music I wanted to listen to was Spiral Scratch. For days, I played no other music. This was back in the mid-80s, when I lived in a tiny studio apartment in Tucson. I’d listen to it before work. I’d put it on as soon as I got home. When the needle made it to the center on side 2, I would flip it over and play “Boredom” again. I counted 56 times through the whole record. I’ve never done that with any other record. It’s a good thing I lived by myself, then, but then maybe the fact that I was alone was part of the reason why I needed that record so much.

I can’t say that right now, this minute, I miss Pete Shelley. I haven’t listened to the Buzzcocks in a good long time, and I can’t pretend that we have any other connection besides the records. But I am pulling out my copies of Spiral Scratch, Another Music, Singles Going Steady, Love Bites, and A Different Kind of Tension as soon as I get home.

Thanks for the music, Pete. Thanks for the hours when your music sustained me. Thanks for understanding.