I thought Pete Shelley was going to die the night Buzzcocks played the Double Door in May 2010. The temperature hadn’t dropped much from its afternoon high of 90 degrees, and the club felt like a steam bath. Shelley’s hair had thinned and he’d put on a ton of weight since I’d last seen the British punk legends seven years earlier. He seemed to be suffering badly under the lights, and as he sweated through the band’s early punk-pop classics—”I Don’t Mind,” “Love You More,” “Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)”—I wondered how many times he’d sung them since they first hit stores in 1978, and where his mind went while his body was tearing through them at breakneck speed.
For all the lust in Shelley’s songs, he was also preoccupied with the great questions of existence, which began to invade his lyrics as Buzzcocks branched out from two-and-a-half-minute blasts of melody into a more psychedelic sound. On Love Bites, the band’s second LP, Shelley revels in paradox, pondering the nature of consciousness (“Only in the real world do things happen like they do in my dreams”) and of time (“Although this may sound strange / My future and my past are presently disarranged / And I’m surfing on a wave of nostalgia for an age yet to come”). Musically he began to favor chiming guitar riffs, repeating endlessly over John Maher’s edgy drums—their grooves reached for hypnosis on such cosmically inclined songs such as “E.S.P.” and “Are Everything.”
