Yesterday’s Not Here: Remembering Pete Shelley
Reflections on the enigmatic Buzzcocks frontman on the fifth anniversary of his passing
It’s yet another of those increasingly shocking and common realizations: A famous rocker has been dead … five years! And it seems like yesterday. Time conflates.
Today, it’s Buzzcocks lead singer-songwriter-guitarist Pete Shelley we’re thinking about. He died from an apparent heart attack on Dec. 6, 2018 at his home in Tallin, Estonia.
I was gutted back then. Still am, really.
And so, the anniversary being a trigger, memories of the singles, albums, gigs and, for me, interviews come flooding back. I saw the Buzzcocks the first time in 1980 and for the last time in 2016. Ironically enough, it was in the same spot in Boston’s theater district, initially the Bradford Hotel Ballroom, later called Royale.
In between, the Buzzcocks played numerous and various-sized venues in our environs, and once, in July 2003, at the big summer shed outside Boston, then called the Tweeter Center. No, they weren’t headlining it. They were opening for Pearl Jam – they were on a 10-date stretch of the band’s Riot Act tour, very much on the bill at Pearl Jam’s behest. The audience, straggling in, didn’t much care. They were the warm-up band. Some old guys.
VIDEO: Jeff Ament of Pearl Jam and John Wicks of Fitz and the Tantrums cover the Buzzcocks’ “Sitting Around at Home”
Pearl Jam cared. A lasting impression is being in the ‘cocks dressing room post-show chatting with the guys, and having a gushing Eddie Vedder burst in, absolutely beside himself, over the moon just to share the space and breathe the same air. He, too, was a fan. Without punk rock and without the Buzzcocks, maybe no grunge and no Pearl Jam.
Punk rock, at some level, always has been about considering life’s proverbial glass, declaring it half empty, and then pretending it’s half full and having a ball. Few bands sculpted this mix of bitterness and euphoria better than the Buzzcocks. In Shelley’s hands – and those of bandmate/co-leader Steve Diggle –the Buzzcocks married witty, questioning lyrics to razor-sharp guitar riffs and earwurm melodies. These songs were nasty, but neat; direct, but elliptical; agitated, but warm, most of them with a classic tension/release structure. Or, as Shelley told me years ago, “We’re not a statement, we’re an adjective. Each time we play it’s like an accident in creation.”
Shelley always favored cryptic lyrics and found joy in repetition. “I think if you start asking questions, that’s better than giving answers,” he said of his songwriting. “That’s the Socratic method. It’s what life’s about, posing that question … until finally you stumble on the right idea.”
And, somewhat humbly: “We realized we have been blessed with really good tunes.”
Oh, god, were they ever. The 1979 collection album of their early 45s, Singles Going Steady, a smashup of A-sides and B-sides, ranks as one of the top punk albums ever: “Orgasm Addict,” “Everybody’s Happy Nowadays,” “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve),” “Why Can’t I Touch It?,” “Promises,” “I Don’t Mind” and “Autonomy” among them.
VIDEO: The Buzzcocks “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)”
Shelley was one of his generation’s best melodists and lyricists — think of him as an existential Paul McCartney on speed without the schmaltz streak. He twisted pessimism around optimism and despair around joy — and he loved to pummel home a refrain. A 1999 concert started with the admission of “I Don’t Know What to Do with My Life” – didn’t I shout along to that one in the late ‘70s? – and closed with the contradiction-laden, seven-minute “I Believe,” a song for which the gleeful refrain “There is no love in this world anymore!” became a bonding sentiment for post-punks.
“I Believe” is a series of stated certainties – some irrational, some profound – that Shelley dismissed at the end with “And I’ll be leavin’/What I believe in.” Clever line, that one.
“The song was all about paradox,” Shelley told me. “That just because you believe something, doesn’t mean it’s true. I was cataloging things, like ‘the elixir of youth’ and ‘the absolute truth,’ and ‘the Final Solution’ and ‘the Workers Revolution.’ Those [last two] would be discredited.”
And Shelley was happy enough to pass the discredit around. “It’s just a ditty,” he says. “A pop song, a rip-off of the chords from Yes’s ‘Starship Trooper.’”
It was a frequent show-closer. I remember seeing Buzzcocks play it in 1991 and they sang it for all it was worth, but a dozen-plus stage-invading fans took it over, grabbing mics and hijacking the gang-shout refrain of “There is no love in this world anymore!”
Me, not being a stage-hopper, was a tad pissed off. I wanted to hear Shelley sing it, not these yobs. Shelley was OK with it. “Who am I to stop people from having a good time?” he said, post-set. “It’s pure theater. We have fun, too.”
With Shelley and Diggle at the helm, Buzzcocks existed from 1977-1981 and then again from 1989-2018. (They started in 1976, as singer Howard Devoto – later to form the post-punk genius band Magazine – was a key player; today, the Buzzcocks soldier on as a quartet with Diggle at the helm.)
The first incarnation of the Buzzcocks busted apart due to the usual causes: drugs, depression, lack of discipline. I talked to Steve Garvey, Buzzcocks bassist through 1981 and then again from 1989 to 1992. Looking back on the early days, he said, “It was very exciting and scary as well. In your dreams you want to be a rock star. But the definition of ‘rock star’ was thrown out the window. You weren’t allowed to call yourself a rock star. But like with Steve Diggle, Pete Townshend was one of my heroes. Me and Steve were jumping around and dancing while Pete was standing there. We didn’t know it, but we were in a magical period.”
“Pete was the most unassuming pop star, ever,” Gang of Four drummer Hugo Burnham told me. His band shared several tours with the Buzzcocks. “That constant, slightly bemused ‘Is this really all happening?!’ look on his face onstage.”
“We could party big time and we had a lot of fun and a lot of great memories,” Garvey said. “Pete was a really sweet guy. But very elusive, He didn’t plan too many things in his life. A real punk rocker. It was great times except when Pete and Steve would get shitfaced and start fighting. Steve had a chip on his shoulder ‘cause they didn’t do enough of his songs.”
In the 80s, Shelley tried his hand as a new wave/synth-pop solo artist, scoring with “Homosapien” and Diggle fronted the band Flag of Convenience. In “Homosapien,” Shelley began with “I’m the shy boy, you’re the coy boy/And you know we’re Homosapien, too.”
Shelley’s sexuality – that is, his bi-sexuality – was always implied and/or taken for granted. In “Orgasm Addict,” co-written with Devoto, half the objects of the masturbatory fantasies were male. Shelley’s songs were often sung in first or second person not so much third (that is, not much he or she, him or her.) At any rate, his sexual orientation was never an issue one way or the other in our many talks over the years: It just never came up.
In terms of the post-Buzzcocks music of Shelley and Diggle, good work on all fronts – Shelley being more successful at it – but when the Buzzcocks got back together in 1989 and toured, well, there was jubilation in the land, at least among us growing-older-by-the-day-missing-our-youth punk fans.
I asked Shelley, whether back in 1976, he could have envisioned being a Buzzcock at this point in time. “Well, no,” he said, “but when we started in ’76, we didn’t think by ’77 we’d be still going.”
Why now?
“It’s as much a mystery to us as it is to everybody else,” he sorta explained. “Really, we’re just caught up in the whirlwind of it all.”
Actually, given another crack at it, Shelley could expound upon the reasons. First, was the fact that EMI was readying a five-LP, three-CD re-issuing of the entire catalog, called Product. Second, rumors of a Buzzcocks reunion were sweeping Britain’s pop world. Shelley caught wind of them, talked to EMI and figured there might be enough genuine interest to fire up the old machine. He checked the group’s US booking agency and the agency confirmed those thoughts vis-a-vis America, too.
“It’s almost by public demand,” mused Shelley. “It would be the wrong thing to get back together for any mistaken reasons. Everything just fell into place as soon as we got back together. Sometimes we talk about it incredulously ourselves.”
Not having seen the show yet, I had to ask him if the fury and fire were still there. Or had time and age put distance between the old material and the band members in present form?
“No, no, no,” said Shelley. “It’s just like it’s something we’d written a couple of days ago. It’s been truly phenomenal, the amount of enjoyment we’ve had playing the songs, the energy and passion that’s there. It isn’t just going through the motions.
What made the band still viable? Confidence?
“Um, either that or just plain stupidness,” said Shelley. “It’s been so much fun playing to people we haven’t played to before because we have that constant reinforcement as to why we’re doing it. That rush of adrenaline is an exciting part.
“I think this time we’ve got a better perspective on what we did. You can always make better decisions in hindsight and therefore we can see what it was what was good and promote the things which are good. We were a bit green and naive at the beginning — I’m talking business-wise — but worldly-wise. Everybody’s proud of what we did.”
VIDEO: Buzzcocks “What Do I Get?”
Steve Garvey got the call about Shelley’s death from longtime band manager Raf Edmonds.
“He told me Pete’s wife, Greta, was not at home at the time,” Garvey said, “and Pete had called to say he wasn’t feeling well. She called an ambulance, got home, and the ambulance was driving away with him. He died either in the ambulance or in hospital.”
Garvey, who exited the band amicably, last saw his old mates play in 2017 at the Stone Pony club in New Jersey.
“We had a good old laugh about who would be the first to die,” Garvey said. “Pete and I both looked at Diggle” – Diggle battled heroin addiction at one point – “and in reality, Pete was the first. He had gained a lot of weight. He never did look after himself ever, though he stopped smoking many years ago. He didn’t do much speed. There was a period around 1980-81 he did some hard drugs. He was a drinker.”
Did all that – the cumulative damage – catch up with him, as it likely did Shane MacGowan at the end of November? Quite possibly. Still, it was a shock to everybody’s system.
Over the years, I’ve become pretty good friends with Diggle – when I was in London in 2003, I spent one pretty beery afternoon at his local with him and his mates – but I didn’t want to bug him for a reaction. On his Facebook page, he thanked people for their kind thoughts “for my brother in arms, my friend and great musical partner. … I am lost for words really but [we] went through so much together and fuck it, made some of the greatest music! Loved him dearly! Here’s to you Pete and all the great people that got it and have been with us all the way.”
- St. Vincent Goes to the Symphony - June 10, 2026
- A Decade Without Prince - April 21, 2026
- Rob Hirst Was the Engine of Midnight Oil - January 23, 2026
You May Also Like
-
December 7, 2018 -
September 14, 2017 -
December 6, 2018
