| The Buzzcocks release their debut self financed 4-track EP 'Spiral Scratch' today on their own New Hormones label. It features 'Breakdown', 'Times Up', 'Boredom' and 'Friends Of Mine'. All Devoto/Shelley compositions. Recorded at Indigo Studios Manchester on the 28th December 1976, at a cost of £500 pound, which half was borrowed off Pete Shelley's Dad who was present in the studio "to make sure we didn't mess about!". It went onto to sell 16,000 copies before being deleted in the Summer of '77 when the band got a major label deal. The single is often credited as the first true independent punk record. The modest picture sleeve features a Polaroid shot of the band taken at the Robert Peel statue in Manchester's Piccadilly Gardens. It is rumoured that the very first few copies came with an insert(?). |
...SATURDAY JANUARY 29TH 1977
| Penetration only 4 gigs old impressed Generation X enough after last weeks support slot in Middlesboro, to make their London debut at The Roxy tonight in the same supporting role. |
| Birthday of Tommy Ramone (Tom Erdelyi) of The Ramones in Budapest, Hungary 1949 |
| This weeks edition of British music weekly New Musical Express features a damning Generation X interview in which hip young gunslinger scribe Tony Parsons took a distinct disliking to 'em. Little did he know that the tee-total Billy Idol and Tony James were both suffering from such a rock'n'roll excess of the clap hence no alcohol!!! Also in this issue is a hippy looking Tom Robinson who gets a profile from Julie Birchill. As a footnote there also was a story on Pete Townsend of The Who who was spotted drinking with a couple of Sex Pistols down the Speakeasy. |
| The Runaways release their second album on Mercury Records today. It's called 'Queens Of Noise' and gets an un-called for hatchet job in the New Musical Express from Mick Farren. But check out 'Hollywood' one of the better tracks, in fact the whole album is good. |
| play the Nashville, London tonight |
| Today's other British music weekly Sounds profiles Rough Trade Records which has been in trade for just over a year and caters for the new alternative music scene and would later become one of the leading UK independent record labels during the next decade. |
| The Jam's first demo session at Polydor is cancelled due to the IRA bomb in Oxford Street, London. |
| 'The Clash's coach driver was a Norman, and they'd all sing, "Noo-orman, Noo-orman." I knew that 'Boredom' was registering with people on some fundamental level." - Howard Devoto, 2001 |
| Devoto left the band on the eve of the record's release, saying... "I get bored very easily, and that boredom can act as a catalyst for me to suddenly conceive and execute a new vocation." He added that "punk rock had already become restrictive and stereotyped". - Howard Devoto 1977 |
| Berlin Brats Van Halen Orange Whiskey , LA $4.00 |
| BUZZCOCKS Spiral Scratch (New Hormones) 'Spiral Scratch', the one (legitimate) surviving example of Buzzcocks under the joint guidance of Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto, stands up well, if pale and scratched both as a hastily scribbled blueprint for the two different directions Shelley and Devoto were to take and as a pre-emptive foray into the treatment of the sheer frustrations of affection between people which moderne pop has now come to accept and rationalise. What Devoto was singing about on the four scrappy little songs recorded in a beat-the-studio-clock rush at the very end of 1976 was a view of love as a source of boredom, resentment, release, very occasional relief: no great revelation, maybe. But the way it was put over in Devoto's own sickly snarl, in Shelley's strangely spangled chords 'starway guitar' as the credit had it), in 16-year-old John Maher's impetuous and irritating drum rolls linked it with the punky clamour that Buzzcocks almost accidentally found themselves caught up in and whispered of a revitalisation of the eternal concern of pop music. 'Boredom' and 'Breakdown' titles entrenched in the spirit of '76 coursed across emotional battlegrounds with the same charged fervour that 'the punks' were employing to (mostly) far less coherent ends. The grey Polaroid on the cover spoke as eloquently as the noise: Devoto diffident and faintly smug, Maher blankly youthful, Steve Diggle (then playing bass) distantly tough, Shelley furtive but inquiring. RICHARD COOK (June 1982) |
