Gig 072: Buzzcocks / Subway Sect
Oxford New Theatre
1 October 1978
I might have said in an earlier post that The Jam were my favourite group, and perhaps that particular week it was true, but the punk group whose records I adored to the point of distraction were Buzzcocks (as Pete Shelley insisted, not the Buzzcocks). I was still blown away by their debut Spiral Scratch 4-track ep, which even now sounds like nothing else on earth and was streets ahead of the competition in almost every respect, taking guitar/bass/drums/vocals somewhere very strange yet strangely accessible, erudite Beckett-referencing lyrics tumbling over themselves like an overloaded fruit machine disgorging its loot. Following the departure of Howard Devoto it might have been reasonable to assume that the game was up; subsequent singles and the first album suggested something quite otherwise. Where Devoto sang about sex in an oddly dispassionate and sexless manner (and would continue to do so, eventually straying into worryingly icky territory), Shelley brought something quite new and revolutionary to the punk oeuvre: vulnerability. This hadn’t been immediately obvious on the first post-Devoto single Orgasm Addict, though the lyrics were funny in a Miss-Acid-Drop kind of way and B-Side Whatever Happened To? broached the commodification of romance, a topic which hardly any other punk act would have touched with several bargepoles joined end to end. However the following single What Do I Get? was something else altogether; was punk ever supposed to be this heartbreaking? Buzzsaw guitar present and correct but no sign of your trademark snotty defiance here, just a breathless declaration of loneliness and rejection, the interrogative title prompting the valedictory response ‘I get no love, I get no sleep at night, I get nothing that’s nice, ’cos I don’t get you’. The adolescent semi-articulacy echoed the northern social-realist cinema of the early 1960s, evoking Sheila Delaney way before Morrissey and only adding to the poignant effect, a world away from oafish shite like Sham 69. (Also I loved the fact that the B-Side was called Oh Shit.) The debut album Another Music in a Different Kitchen was a magical combination of punk attitude, Mancunian melodicism and bold experimentation drawing on Can and the Velvet Underground, followed six months later by the rather patchy but often excellent Love Bites, which I bought it along with Give ’Em Enough Rope by the Clash at the Music Market record shop in Oxford, the former making the latter sound very stodgy and unimaginative. Love Bites received lukewarm reviews but still sounds great today, while GEER sounds even more stodgy. Buzzcocks defied the punk rulebook by including long, repetitive tunes somewhat in the vein of Roxy Music’s more outré output, and occasional instrumentals. And the (modest, in chart terms) hits just kept on coming. One of the best and most subversive things about Buzzcocks was the complete absence of machismo: not only did Shelley write lyrics worthy of Smokey Robinson (‘You spurn my natural emotion, you make me feel like dirt and I’m hurt’), he was way ahead of the curve in using what would now be called the non-binary second person, i.e the ‘you’ was always non-gender-specific.
So it’s fair to say I was really looking forward to this gig, and the fact of the opening act being Subway Sect only added to the delicious anticipation. Subway Sect had been around since the very beginning of the UK punk scene but took longer than most to release records: only the singles Nobody’s Scared and the magnificent Ambition were in the public domain. Like Buzzcocks, their approach was rudimentary but adventurous, shunning the Les Paul churn and snarl of more conventional punk acts in favour of trebly, chiming guitars and a nasal, estuarine declamation of strange, oddly affecting lyrics: ‘I am a dried-up seed, can't be restored; I hope no one notices the sleep on me; I've been walking all down this shallow slope; looking for nothing particularly’. Live, again like Buzzcocks, they shunned macho posturing, hunched over their cheap-looking guitars and barely moving. As one of their songs would have it, ‘We oppose all rock’n’roll’. Impossible to pin down, this was the real punk, and to be honest the audience didn’t know what to make of it; you couldn’t really pogo or get a mosh-pit going, and you certainly couldn’t sing along or even go ‘yeeahhh!’ No problem to me, I liked it that way. Subway Sect would go one to be a massive influence on a generation of groups, particularly, for some reason, in Scotland.
This sense of discombobulation would carry over to Buzzcocks’ set. A bit like Talking Heads or Television, this was ‘punk’ but not in any conventionally understood sense, unsuited to your pavlovian pogo-and-gob response. Thus the audience didn’t quite know how to respond, and it didn’t help at all that the New Theatre was a seated venue either. Not that this bothered a crowd of punks and skinheads from the Oranges & Lemons pub who were in the habit of sneaking into the theatre and hiding in the toilets until the headline set started, bursting out and piling straight down the front once the gig was underway. Any attempt to shepherd them back to their seats was hopeless since they didn’t have seats, and in the meantime the rest of the stalls had to stand up to see. It improved the vibe immeasurably. By about the third song (Fiction Romance if I remember rightly) they had spilled into the orchestra pit and were attempting to invade the stage, which prompted Shelley to stop the song and upbraid them in the manner of a stern Lancastrian primary school teacher: ‘Right, back in the stalls or we’re not going to carry on!’ Surprisingly, the startled throng rather meekly obeyed, and so the no-filler set played out, one brilliant tune after another peaking with Ever Fallen in Love and ending with the circular drone of ESP, Steve Diggle’s 4-note riff running all the way through the song and the group departing one by one until he was left to finish alone on the stage. It was a curiously low-key way to end a set, but then Buzzcocks were a curious act in the context of the time: not a hint of bombast or machismo, no pose-striking (though Shelley’s Mondrian-print shirts were very cool), a small and slightly camp frontman who sang beautiful melodies in the voice of a female factory worker from Coronation Street. Come on, what’s not to like?
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