4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Herald Scotland
Buzzcocks on how punk went from Glasgow ban to Bellahouston
On Saturday though a star-studded lineup of the scene's progenitors - Stranglers included - will headline Bellahouston Park, capacity circa 35,000.
Buzzcocks were there from the beginning, as Britain's youth turned to spiky hair and safety pins, and they'll be there in Glasgow on Saturday when the combat boots are dusted off by the city's elder punks.
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Who better, then, to chart the journey from banned to Bellahouston.
Guitarist and last suriving original member Steve Diggle tells The Herald: "We brought the Sex Pistols to Manchester when it (punk) was kind of unknown, really.
"That's where we all met, the next day me, Howard Devoto and Pete Shelley plugged into an amp and a terrible beauty was born, to quote Yates.
"A couple of weeks later we opened for the Pistols in Manchester, we got reviewed and that put it on the map. So we were there right at the beginning.
"We were doing that in Manchester and The Clash and the Pistols in London and we got to know them well, there was a connection between us because all of this was kind of new at the time.
"The landscape was kind of dead, really, you had prog rock bands but they'd run their course and nothing was happening for a few years.
"Suddenly you got this excitement, and everybody came alive."
The Britain into which punk was birthed was one of high inflation and unemployment, of industrial unrest and a shifting political climate.
It was famously referred to as "the sick man of Europe", with unemployment reaching 5.5% in 1978, the year the first Buzzcocks album was released.
Diggle says: "Britain was black and white and grey - it was just boring, you know?
"I was coming up to 20 and you kind of wanted some excitement. I'd been playing guitar since I was 17 and for three years I'd been trying to write songs and all that stuff and then suddenly this punk rock thing happened.
"It hit the country like a carpet bomb, it was an explosion of the imagination - people thought things were possible, including ourselves, it was like an exchange between the bands and the crowd.
"There wasn't any rivalry then, because we all started at the same time so if I run into a member of The Clash, or the Pistols, or The Jam we know where we come from so there isn't any rivalry.
"It was great, we'd put a record out and they'd acknowledge that, then we'd acknowledge theirs.
"It seemed like every week a single from one of those bands was coming out, it was a magical time."
The poster for the punk all dayer (Image: DF Concerts) As punk was booming in the UK a similar thing was happening across the Atlantic with bands like The Ramones, Dead Kennedys and Television.
However, Diggle doesn't feel there was a great deal of cultural overlap.
He says: "The Ramones released their first album just before we released Spiral Scratch (the first Buzzcocks EP) and that was kind of a big influence, that first Ramones album was great.
"I think it inspired The Clash and really everybody, it was fast and furious and straight to the point - all the music was direct in those early days.
"So we had The Ramones and in the past MC5, Iggy Pop, The Suzies and all that stuff, and obviously The Velvet Underground.
"But me and Pete grew up as kids of the 60s really, with The Kinks, The Beatles, The Who.
"So we were aware of the American part but this was more of a British thing, all those bands were very British and thinking about things more over here, the stuff we were all going through at the time.
"Actually when we first went to America, The Ramones came to see us. We got off the stage and they were all there, and they were kind of saying, 'we do that straight ahead stuff but you guys take it somewhere else' so they loved that about the Buzzcocks."
Buzzcocks in 1978 (Image: Newsquest) British punk also carried a more political bent, though Diggle's band were less overt than contemporaries like The Clash.
He says: "The Buzzcocks sang a lot about the human condition, you know?
"There were political ones, Joe Strummer loved my song 'Autonomy' on the first album.
"We had distorted guitars and we had that attitude, we had things like 'Orgasm Addict' (which was banned by the BBC).
"The Clash were a bit more externally political but a lot of my songs are political underneath. Songs like 'Why She's A Girl From A Chain Store', we had a lot of complexity with it as well, we had a bit of existentialism about us.
"It wasn't as simple as going 'the government's wrong', it was dealing with other complexities as well. We knew the government was wrong but it's not a case of thinking the crowd is so simple they don't understand those kind of things.
"When we all started it was all under this umbrella of punk, initially no-one could particularly differentiate between any of them.
"But then as we kept making albums each band got its own identity, so even within that movement we were all different."
Though bands like The Clash and the Sex Pistols had their pop chops too, Buzzcocks were perhaps the most melodic of the first wave bands.
Their influence can be heard in the lineage of punk and its offshoots, from Nirvana and Green Day to Supergrass and the Manic Street Preachers.
L-R. Steve Diggle, Steve Garvey, John Maher, Pete Shelley (Image: Fin Costello/Redferns) Diggle says: "It's quite amazing, at the time you're just making a record you don't think you'll be inspiring other people.
"It's a great compliment, Nicky Wire from the Manic Street Preachers said 'when we started we were playing 'Autonomy'. REM, U2, Pearl Jam, Nirvana and loads of other bands you've probably never heard of will say 'we used to do a Buzzcocks song when we were starting out'.
"You can hear a lot of echoes of Buzzcocks in other people's records, Green Day and people like that, which is not something we ever set out to do."
The group has somewhat come full-circle, and will once again play alongside the Sex Pistols at the 'punk all-dayer' at Glasgow Green on June 21, as will The Stranglers, The Undertones, Skids and The Rezillos.
Punk's not dead, as they say, though admittedly some of those groups' former members are.
Diggle says: "They still do Shakespeare and he's a lot older than us, so we've got time!
"We were supposed to headline Hyde Park twice and were banned because we were a punk band, but we've gone full-circle here.
"It'll be a great day playing with all those bands. It's still alive and well, you know? Still rolling on."
The Punk All Dayer takes place at Bellahouston Park on Saturday, June 21. Tickets are available here.
