Shelley, the romantic punk

Stevie Chick revisits the career of songwriter Pete Shelley, the frontman who left Buzzcocks in 1981 to recast himself as a queer-pop electro pioneer, as his early albums are reissued

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As the 1980s began, Pete Shelley found himself at a low ebb. Since their very first gigs in 1976, his band Buzzcocks had easily distinguished themselves among the punk-rock moshpit. Disdaining the scene’s rote “bad boy” pantomiming, Shelley’s soft Bolton tones sounded a rare note of reason amid a frothing 1977 BBC Television debate on whether punk was “a threat to British society”, while the following year he told Melody Maker that Buzzcocks were “just four nice lads, the kind of people you could take home to your parents”. And he’d fused punk’s velocity to timeless songwriting across hits like “What Do I Get?”, “Love You More” and, of course, “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)”, displaying a feel for melody and a lyrical sophistication far beyond his peers.

Three albums in, however, Buzzcocks were now running on empty. A burned-out Shelley had called time on touring and entered “an introspective phase”, leaning heavily on psychedelics for guidance and inspiration. While making 1980 single “Are Everything”, Shelley told Trouser Press he took acid “for every part of it – recording, mixing. It was my acid song”. Still, he struggled to “get the ideas I had across” to his Buzzcocks bandmates. “I wasn’t doing myself any good, I was just wringing out my soul to get songs done.”

Things got so bad Shelley even dipped a toe in Scientology (though he later admitted he “couldn’t make head nor tail” of L Ron Hubbard’s textbook Dianetics