Buzzcocks – I Don’t Mind // Autonomy (United Artists) 1978. Pete Shelley wrote songs that capture the moment after a relationship fails better than anyone. The moment when you’re through being pissed off at the other person, you know it’s over and you begin the torturous self-examination. You lie on the couch and don’t even notice that hours have passed and that it’s gotten dark. You try to read or watch TV but you have no capacity left for sticking with anything. “When everything I see makes me feel you’re putting me down and if it’s true this pathetic clown will keep hanging around, that’s if you don’t mind”. “Well, I’m not going to keep hanging around”, you think to yourself, momentarily empowered before you collapse again in self-absorption and confusion. If this was the only song Pete wrote it would be enough but he wrote at least a dozen songs as perfect as this one about the same damn thing. The perfect chord progressions combined with Pete’s fey delivery and the stinging wit of the lyrics is both bittersweet and powerful. We all know this but it’s worth saying again, these guys invented pop-punk. The B-Side is no slouch either. I recommend you listen to it and then put on Throb Throb by Naked Raygun to hear the missing connection between UK Punk and the US hardcore sound. Most of us heard both of these songs for the first time on Singles Going Steady but they are both on the first Buzzcocks full-length, Another Music in A Different Kitchen too. The Buzzcocks are my Beatles.
Hardcore Podcasts
September of 2010 I put together eight Hardcore Podcasts. You can check them out here if you are interested. For more insight into how I came up with the years 78-90 for the First Wave you can read about The Hardcore Superiorty Myth.
What’s with all the UK 70s punk?
I was in the mood. Not a bad thing, no?
Buzzcocks. One of the best fucking bands ever.
Nope! not bad at all.
My love for this song feels somehow validated now that someone else has made a blog post expressing similar feelings to my own.
My two favorite things about this video are the budding almost-mullet and the cheese factor of the way the lead guitar bit and Pete singing were placed in the same image.
that little multiple effect when he hits the chorus 0:20 is pretty sweet too
“Another music” is easily 77 era Brit Punk Rock’s best album, just after “Never Mind the Bollocks” in my book; and with “Pink Flag”, “Machine Gun Etiquette”, “The Clash”, “Crossing the Red sea…”, “The Crack”, “Inflammable Material” as serious contenders, that one wasn’t exactly an easy feat.
Gorgeous stuff.
hands down one of the best bands ever…..
It was just as you describe it… I heard these pearls for the first in “Singles Going Steady”, one of the first albums I ever had. I found it digging through the old vinyls in the corner of a record store in the early 80′s, and I went home quite quickly, anxious to hear it. Ever since, “Singles Going Steady” has been part of the soundtrack of my life. Several years later I also got “Another Music in a Different Kitchen” as a gift from a friend of my elder brother, who had it for a long time, but thought that I would be a better owner for that record. What a gift!
Check out the “Spiral Scratch” 4track EP… Shelley/Devoto masterpiece