When Manchester pop-punk subversives Buzzcocks infiltrated the charts with their 1978 single, Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve), the song’s infectious true confession was a perfectly cynical display of unrequited love-lust. But the 2 minutes 40 second litany of gender-neutral spleen-venting was more than just a dirty secret laid bare. Penned by late Buzzcocks frontman Pete Shelley in a parked van outside Edinburgh’s main post office on Waterloo Place, the song’s resonance has trickled down the decades in a way that goes significantly beyond its original hormonally-charged intent.
Shelley’s breathlessly yearning lyrics set to an
amphetamine-driven buzz-saw melody not only showed how artforms inter-connect
and inspire one another during periods of social distancing and enforced
isolation. The background to the evolution of Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone
You Shouldn’t’ve) itself chimes with some very current concerns. These include
the importance of grassroots music venues and a healthy small-scale touring
circuit. The geographical location of the song’s composition also highlights
the urgent need for arts funding for free-lancers and the benefits of a universal
basic income for all.
Buzzcocks were on their first headline UK tour when
Shelley was inspired by an old Hollywood musical to write Ever Fallen in Love
(With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve). It was November 1977, and the band had released
their first major label single, Orgasm Addict, a month earlier after signing to
United Artists that August. With the single housed in a sleeve designed by
Malcolm Garrett and featuring a provocative feminist collage by artist and punk
peer Linder Sterling to match the A-side’s title, Orgasm Addict was a bold
pop/art statement that chimed with the prick-kicking times.
Shelly and original Buzzcocks vocalist Howard Devoto
had taken their new band’s name from a headline in London listings magazine
Time Out accompanying a review of ITV’s girl band based fringe-theatre styled 1976
TV drama, Rock Follies. The headline declared that ‘It’s the Buzz, Cock!’, and
so it seemed to be, as Shelley and Devoto seized the means of production from
the off.
After seeing the Sex Pistols in London, the pair brought
the potty-mouthed agents provocateurs of punk to Manchester twice, with
attendees at the two Lesser Free Trade Hall gigs that took place a month apart
in the summer of ‘76 inspired to form bands themselves. That these included
future members of Joy Division, The Fall and The Smiths is enough in itself to
show how grassroots music scenes explode once a creative catalyst has been
lobbed into the thick of things. It is also something that no state-sanctioned
cultural strategy is ever likely to achieve.
When Buzzcocks’ Devoto/Shelley-led line-up released
their self-financed Spiral Scratch EP on their own New Hormones label in
January 1977, it kick-started a non-London-based indie record label revolution.
Amongst many ‘regional’ imprints, those picking up Buzzcocks’ mantle included Alan
Horne’s Postcard Records in Glasgow and Bob Last and Hilary Morrison’s Fast
Product label in Edinburgh. The rest, be it through records by Orange Juice,
Josef K, Aztec Camera and The Go-Betweens, or through those by The Mekons, Gang
of Four, The Human League and Scars, or Fire Engines, Flowers, Boots for
Dancing and all the others, is post-punk-funk-electro-pop/clash history.
Buzzcocks’ influence trickled outwards musically as
much as ideologically. Part of the opening riff and military style drum-roll of
the band’s song, Autonomy, the B-side of their April 1978 single, I Don’t Mind,
could be heard two years later on the intro of Orange Juice’s second Postcard
single, Blue Boy. This was a song written by Orange Juice vocalist Edwyn
Collins about Shelley. Orange Juice made their debt to Buzzcocks even more explicit
in their 1983 chart hit, Rip it Up, on which vocalist Collins quoted two lines
from Boredom, one of four songs on Spiral Scratch, declaring it to be his
favourite song prior to co-opting the song’s two-note guitar riff.
Collins’ ‘Rip it Up and Start Again’ lyric went on
to be used as the title for Simon Reynolds’ 2005 history of post-punk. The book
told the story of Collins writing Blue Boy after meeting Shelley backstage at
the Edinburgh Playhouse date of The Clash’s White Riot tour six months before
Buzzcocks’ Clouds date. Rip it Up was also used as the name of the National
Museum of Scotland’s 2018 exhibition on the history of Scottish pop and rock
music. Claimed by both, Collins’ lyric about the desire to rewind a moment in
order to be more articulate with the object of one’s affection had
retrospectively become a clarion call for greater change beyond.
Meanwhile, those occupying the broadest of churches
that is ‘the arts’ in Scotland are currently making their case to be included
in the £10 million of ScotGov emergency funds and £97 million of Westminster
money designed to support it during the Covid-19 crisis. With £2.2 million
earmarked by ScotGov for grassroots music venues, Rip it Up’s co-opted
implications of changing history, tearing down walls and kicking over statues
sounds more pertinent than ever. If ever a slogan is required to propagate a
proposed redistribution of wealth among free-lance workers by way of a brand new
Year Zero, Rip it Up is there for the taking.
Most bands who released records on independent
labels in Buzzcocks’ post Spiral Scratch day started out and sometimes finished
either on student grants or the dole, Margaret Thatcher’s great gift to young
creative upstarts. Up until the ‘90s, the dole was a rites of passage and a
means to an end regarded by many as an unofficial arts council grant that
allowed you to explore your potential. This was the case whether forming a
band, starting a fanzine or starting a label or a club night that was part
gang-hut, part arts lab.
Sometimes, Thatcher’s children were so grateful that
bands even named themselves after the card required to sign on once a fortnight
to ensure your Giro cheque arrived in the mail two days later in order to be
cashed at post offices like that on Waterloo Place. As with many dole queue
superstars, UB40 did quite well for themselves.
The labels were run from wardrobes and front-rooms
in tenement flats, enabled for some by the Enterprise Allowance Scheme. This
was a government-sanctioned sleight-of-hand that helped those on it to found
small businesses, more often than not as free-lancers. The scheme also massaged
the unemployment figures to look not quite as big as they actually were while
bunging those taking part an extra tenner a week. This duly opened up would-be captains
of what we now call the creative industries to the world of possibilities
promised by a then burgeoning boom-or-bust free-market economy.
But Pete Shelley wasn’t thinking any of this when he
wrote Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t Have) in a parked van
outside Edinburgh’s main post office. Nor would he know that the building on
Waterloo Place that then housed the post office would be rebranded thirty-odd
years later as Waverley Gate. Here, residents of the building’s untouchably glossy
offices would include Creative Scotland, the country’s arts funding quango formed
out of the infinitely more approachable Scottish Arts Council, with extra added
Scottish Screen thrown in.
CS was ill-conceived from the off, with the
organisation’s first generously salaried chief executive’s tenure prompting a
revolt by Scotland’s artistic community in 2012, before he wandered off to into
the sunset to another overpaid post. His successor at CS met a similar fate.
Johnny Rotten’s contemptuous final public utterings
as a Sex Pistol to a fawning American crowd spring to mind here. “Ever get the
feeling you’ve been cheated?” would have made an all too appropriate
two-fingered epitaph to what at the time looked very much like The Great
Creative Scotland Swindle.
Back in 1977, however, such top-down managerialist constructions
were a long way off, and Edinburgh’s head post office was where a generation of
wannabe artists went to cash their Giro. For young dreamers with no
responsibilities to anyone other than themselves, the dole was a form of
democracy in action, where everybody was paid the same, with few questions
asked. And once you’d got through the initial inquisition, rather than fill in
endless forms a la future funding bodies, all you had to do was turn up at High
Riggs or Torphichen Street once a fortnight and sign your name.
Being a long-term doleite or else subverting the
Enterprise Allowance Scheme back then was arguably a primitive equivalent of
Universal Basic Income. This offered up the space and potential for everyone so
inclined to become an artist, or at least to explore and experiment with what
Joseph Beuys, the German iconoclast who Richard Demarco had brought to
Edinburgh a few years earlier, called social sculpture. Finding a physical
outlet for all that, alas, was an altogether different kind of tension.
The night before Pete Shelley wrote Ever Fallen in
Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) outside Edinburgh’s head post office
building that would later become Waverley Gate, Buzzcocks played a venue called
Clouds. This was in Tollcross, and was one of the key gig hang-outs during
Edinburgh’s punk explosion.
Clouds originally opened in the 1940s as the New
Cavendish ballroom, which was part of a thriving dancehall circuit that
featured big bands. As music and social scenes changed down the decades, the
venue adapted. Pink Floyd played there in the 1960s, while in the 1970s, local
promoters Regular Music put on a stream of punk acts.
The venue later became Coaster’s, with the smaller second
space housing the Hoochie Coochie club. As the club moved away from gigs,
numerous other rebrandings followed, which at various points saw it become the
Cavendish, Network, Outer Limits, Lava and Ignite and The Cav.
At Cloud’s, Buzzcocks were supported by Johnny And
the Self Abusers, The Prefects and The Skids. Johnny and the Self Abusers would
later morph into Simple Minds, while The Prefects begat Stewart Lee favourites,
The Nightingales. Skids frontman Richard Jobson became something of a
renaissance man as a film director and author, while guitarist Stuart Adamson
went on to found Big Country. The various success stories that followed from
each of these bands demonstrate the vital importance of venues such as Clouds.
Bands and artists don’t come fully formed, and need spaces to play in order to
develop.
Similarly, operations such as Regular need those
places to put on gigs. Founded on hippy idealism and a DIY aesthetic, Regular
are now Scotland’s oldest independent promotors, and continue to support
grassroots venues and developing artists as well as larger events. Today’s
equivalent of both Clouds and Regular require ScotGov support as much the new
generations of artists they nurture. Without it, the big-name acts of tomorrow
who might leave their mark on pop culture just as much as Buzzcocks have will
have no space, time or money to do that developing. In the words of another
Shelley lyric, they’ll have nothing left at all.
This goes way beyond the relatively recent problem
of all-consuming gentrification closing down venues. The effects of Covid-19
pandemic could mean a total decimation of grassroots spaces that will undoubtedly be exploited to the max
by the sort of predatory developers already hovering. Beyond the buildings themselves,
the communities and social scenes that occupy them will be locked out for good.
One imagines many of the regulars watching Buzzcocks
at Clouds to be either on the dole or in lieu of student grants in much the
same way those on stage had been. These allowed their generation to indulge in
pressure-free leisure time that enabled them to explore hitherto undiscovered
ideas and assorted means of artistic expression.
With the relative short-term safety net of a dole
cheque or a grant, they could do this in ways their latter-day peers are no
longer able to. Instead, they’re more likely to be working off their student loans
or else are forced out of the creative industries entirely for simply not being
able to afford to be part of it. With today’s equivalent of Clouds looking set
to struggle to survive in the era of socially-distanced events ahead, chances
are that those wanting to will have nowhere to go, anyway.
The night before they played Clouds, Buzzcocks stayed
in Edinburgh at the now long lost Blenheim Guest House on Blenheim Place. This
wasn’t far from the Playhouse, where they’d supported The Clash that May with
The Slits and Subway Sect as part of the headlining band’s White Riot tour.
With punk outlawed in Glasgow, it was the Playhouse
show that provoked Scotland’s own musical revolution in much the same way the
two Buzzcocks-promoted Sex Pistols shows had done in Manchester. The Blenheim
was one of numerous businesses that exist around theatres and music venues who
receive a boost from the association. As the current crisis has so cruelly proven,
however, remove one card from a free-market pack, and the whole house comes
tumbling down with it.
With presumably little in the way of local
night-life to tempt them outdoors on a Thursday night – not for nothing did
Kafka-inspired Edinburgh scratch-funk existentialists Josef K name their sole
album The Only Fun in Town - Buzzcocks spent the night in the Blenheim’s bar.
As documented in Tony McGartland’s book, Buzzcocks – The Complete History,
originally published in 1995 and revised for a new edition in 2017, Shelley
found himself in the guest house’s TV room half-watching the Hollywood film of
hit Broadway musical, Guys and Dolls.
Guys and Dolls had been inspired by two short
stories by Damon Runyon, whose baroque pen portraits of New York’s
prohibition-era underbelly laid bare a world of gamblers, shysters and nightclub
singers with comic relish. The musical was penned by composer and lyricist
Frank Loesser, with a book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. It spun a yarn about
hustlers Nathan Detroit and Sky Masterson, and their respective romances with
nightclub singer and Nathan’s long-term fiancé, Adelaide, and leader of the
Save-a-Soul Mission, Sarah Brown. Spoiler alert. Sky falls for Sarah after
becoming embroiled in a $1,000 bet with Nathan to take her on a date to Havana.
The original production of Guys and Dolls opened on
Broadway in 1950, and with a fistful of Loesser’s songs such as Luck Be a Lady,
Sit Down You’re Rockin’ The Boat and Sue Me in tow, was a smash hit. The film
version, written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, arrived onscreen five
years later, and starred Frank Sinatra as Nathan, Marlon Brando as Sky, Jean
Simmons as Sarah and, the only survivor of the Broadway production, Vivian
Blaine as Adelaide.
As quoted in the Guardian in 2006, “We were in the
Blenheim Guest House with pints of beer, sitting in the TV room half-watching
Guys and Dolls,” said Shelley. “One of the characters, Adelaide, is saying to
Marlon Brando’s character, ‘Wait till you fall in love with someone you
shouldn’t have’. I thought, ‘fallen in love with someone you shouldn’t have?
Hmm, that’s good.’”
The line comes from the scene in the film when Sky
delivers Adelaide a message from Nathan, who fails to turn up for his and
Adelaide’s planned elopement.
“Wait till you fall in love with somebody you
shouldn’t,” is the actual line Blaine’s dejected Adelaide says to Brando. “Wait
till it happens to you.”
Either way, Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You
Shouldn’t’ve) was the result the next day. Without so much as a Giro cheque,
never mind a Creative Scotland grant, the baton had been passed, from Runyon’s
short fiction to Loesser and co.’s stage musical to Mankiewicz’s starry Hollywood
blockbuster, and now to Shelley and Buzzcocks’ punk-pop classic.
Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve)
would go on to be covered by Fine Young Cannibals, who scored a hit with it
after it appeared on the soundtrack of Jonathan Demme’s 1986 film, Something
Wild. A couple of years later, FYC vocalist Roland Gift appeared on the
Edinburgh Festival Fringe in grassroots theatre company Hull Truck’s production
of Romeo and Juliet at Marco’s Leisure Centre, not far from the sites of Clouds
and Torphichen Street dole office.
A version of Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You
Shouldn’t’ve) by Pete Yorn appeared on the soundtrack of Shrek 2 in 2004. A
year later, an all-star charity tribute to late DJ and Buzzcocks champion John
Peel saw Shelley team up with unlikely bedfellows including Robert Plant, Elton
John and Roger Daltry for an en masse version of the song designed to raise
funds for Amnesty International.
Further covers included one from French loungecore
trio Nouvelle Vague in 2006, while a version by actress Amanda Billing was a
hit in New Zealand after it appeared in TV soap, Shortland Street. All this
from Buzzcocks’ night in an Edinburgh guest house watching a Hollywood musical
prior to a gig in a club called Clouds and some time out in a van parked
outside the head post office that would later become the home of Creative
Scotland.
This is how umbilical dots are joined up between
artforms, and how, one way or another, the books read and the films and plays
watched by latter-day artists playing today’s version of Clouds will rub off on
them. Which is why all artforms – including those sired in grassroots music
venues - should be treated as equals, especially when it comes to emergency
funds for helping secure the survival of those affected by Covid.
If the new Year Zero is upon us and we really are
going to rip it up and start again, as a show of faith and solidarity with freelancers,
all high-salaried permanent staff at the top of arts institutions might also want
to rethink their roles in order for things to be reimagined from a not so
spiral scratch.
But those designated by ScotGov to distribute the £2.2 million made available
for grassroots music venues in Scotland should tread carefully. Exactly how
grassroots music and arts scenes are defined is up for debate, and freelance DIY
auteurs and micro-based venues should be in the mix and arguing their small
corner. All involved need to be careful too not to let purely commercial forces
co-opt any notion of grassroots in order to monopolise the funds available.
With independent venues such as The Welly in Hull
and The Deaf Institute in Manchester forced to close for good over the last few
days, it is their equivalent in Scotland that need the support. These include dives
such as Henry’s Cellar Bar, Leith Depot and the Voodoo Rooms in Edinburgh, the
Glad Café in Glasgow and numerous others across the country.
With assorted working groups and task-forces already
advising, ScotGov could do a lot worse than talk to those behind Glasgow-based
record label, Last Night from Glasgow. Founded in 2016, LNFG is run as a
not-for-profit on a subscription-based model, in which members contribute to
decisions behind the label’s releases.
To date, LNFG has released more than 80 records,
some of which were supported by Creative Scotland. LNFG’s DIY ethos both with
records and promoting gigs by its roster of artists has arguably picked up the
mantle of Buzzcocks, Spiral Scratch and the wave of independent record labels
that followed in their wake.
Since lockdown, LNFG have been working on Isolation
Sessions, a compilation album of the label’s acts covering songs by their peers.
Funds raised from sales of the record will go to the assorted independent grassroots
venues which were scheduled to host numerous LNFG gigs over the last four
months. Such a show of solidarity shows how a music industry can retain a punk
ethos in a supportive democratic environment rather than a competitive
corporate one. The label’s faith in such an ethos seems to have paid off. In
pre-sales alone, Isolation Sessions is already Last Night from Glasgow’s
biggest selling record to date, and the possibilities for another music in a
different kitchen are endless.
Beyond such grassroots idealism, and beyond Pete
Shelley writing Ever Fallen in Love (With Someone You Shouldn’t’ve) in a parked
van outside Edinburgh’s main post office where Giros used to be cashed in a
building that would later be the home of Scotland’s arts funding body, there
are plenty of other Buzzcocks song titles that fit the moment just now.
What Do I Get? is of course the question on every
free-lancer’s lips, with Autonomy the ultimate goal. But it is that other
freelance post-punk poet, Edwyn Collins, whose Buzzcocks inspired words sums up
the moment. In terms of reinventing the arts from the ground up into something
more democratic, now really is the time to rip it up and start again.
Details on support for grassroots music venues can
be found from the Music Venue Trust at www.musicvenuetrust.com
Isolation Sessions can be ordered from Last Night from
Glasgow at www.lastnightfromglasgow.com
Bella Caledonia, July 2020
ends
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