When Pete Shelley returned to Genetic Studios in leafy Berkshire in February 1981, the plan had been to sketch out songs for the fourth Buzzcocks album with the band’s trusted producer Martin Rushent. Trouble was, neither Shelley nor Rushent could face working on Buzzcocks material. That ship had sailed: 1980 was not a vintage year for the band whose effervescent power-pop had shown that punk could be fun and vulnerable, whose run of blistering singles from ’77 to ’79 meant so much to so many, and the way Shelley was withholding his new ideas from the rest of the group suggested that something was up. Other warning signs, noted by bandmate Steve Diggle in his book Harmony In My Head, included Shelley moaning to the press about how unhappy he was and how restricted he felt in the band, telling journalists, “Punk is dead”, and saying how he wanted to explore the possibilities of electronic music.
When Pete Shelley returned to Genetic Studios in leafy Berkshire in February 1981, the plan had been to sketch out songs for the fourth Buzzcocks album with the band’s trusted producer Martin Rushent. Trouble was, neither Shelley nor Rushent could face working on Buzzcocks material. That ship had sailed: 1980 was not a vintage year for the band whose effervescent power-pop had shown that punk could be fun and vulnerable, whose run of blistering singles from ’77 to ’79 meant so much to so many, and the way Shelley was withholding his new ideas from the rest of the group suggested that something was up. Other warning signs, noted by bandmate Steve Diggle in his book Harmony In My Head, included Shelley moaning to the press about how unhappy he was and how restricted he felt in the band, telling journalists, “Punk is dead”, and saying how he wanted to explore the possibilities of electronic music.
Buzzcocks formally split in March ’81 and by then Shelley and Rushent were certainly testing the limits of the new technology recently acquired for Genetic, Rushent’s plush Thameside HQ. “The computer or synthesizer is the great leveller. It is no longer necessary to be a virtuoso to make good things,” Rushent told Rolling Stone in July ’82. Shelley had arrived with a 12-string guitar but was soon immersed in electronic sound – Genetic had a rare Fairlight CMI, banks of modules and a full range of analogue synths, including a Roland Microcomposer, which the pair got to grips with as Shelley assembled older songs such as “Homosapien”, “Love In Vain” and “Maxine” from his first band Jets Of Air, and wrote the likes of “Witness The Change” and “I Don’t Know What It Is”: familiar Buzzcocks titles for atmospheric tracks built up from programmed rhythms and basslines. Genetic also had an arrangement with Island and offered Shelley a solo deal.
Shelley, who died in December 2018 aged 63, will be remembered for his pithy and poignant Buzzcocks songs which he seemingly dashed off at will in his teens and early twenties. But he loved electronic music too: from Can, Tangerine Dream and Neu! to more wayward experimental gear, he was intrigued by sound, and its strange immediacy suited his impulsive nature. In 1980, he released his solo debut Sky Yen – two 20-minute blasts of wild oscillations recorded in 1974 – on his own Groovy label, which Drag City reissued in 2011 alongside LPs by his ramshackle industrial acts Free Agents and Strange Men In Sheds With Spanners. His 2002 reunion with Howard Devoto for Buzzkunst used synth-driven post-punk to make its tongue-in-cheek point.
In many ways, writing for himself and arranging his ideas on computer allowed Shelley to express himself more freely, in bolder, funkier, even saucier terms. His bisexuality and queerness – there if you look for it in the Buzzcocks’ hits – surfaced quite naturally on Homosapien and inevitably colours perception of the record and its follow-up XL-1. “Homosapien” and Rushent’s groundbreaking 10-minute “Elongated Dancepartydubmix” of it were hits on the radio and in the club, even though the BBC banned the song for its “explicit reference to gay sex” – the “Homosuperior, in my interior” line – not quite appreciating Shelley’s self-deprecating humour: “I’m the cruiser, you’re the loser”; more Rising Damp than Are You Being Served?. Eagle-eyed admirers might’ve spotted the green carnation in the lapel of Shelley’s white suit on the album cover and in the video for “Homosapien”, a symbol for gay men, once used by Oscar Wilde.
Homosapien is an exciting record but not necessarily a great album. With “Homosapien” becoming a sizeable hit across the pond, the Americans, to their credit, replaced the weaker ballads “Keats Song” and “It’s Hard Enough Knowing” with the strident “Witness The Change” and poppier “Love In Vain” on the US version, releasing this in October ’81, three months before the pushed-back UK release in January ’82. By then, the Human League’s Dare – an album programmed and produced by Rushent immediately after Homosapien, using the same machines – had already topped the charts, giving the impression that Shelley’s effort was somehow inferior or lacked that elusive X factor.
In their arrangement, the way they burst into life, Shelley’s “Qu’est-ce Que C’est Que Ça” and “Yesterday’s Not Here” could be demos for Dare. Equally fruitful for Rushent was his prescient decision to cut and splice certain tracks to create extended mixes for the club. The dub of “Witness The Change”/“I Don’t Know What Love Is”, at once tough, hallucinogenic and tuneful, has been a Balearic banger for decades – a portal to Shelley for those who’d never bothered with Buzzcocks. From XL-1, the masterful funk flex of “Many A Time” and a 13-minute album megamix teem with ideas Rushent deployed on his widescreen revamp of Dare for the League Unlimited Orchestra’s Love And Dancing LP the year before.
Released in May ’83, XL-1 was shaped by the same machines but had more human involvement (Barry Adamson joined on bass and “ideas”, Genetic’s session player Jim Russell drummed) and was carried, like Homosapien, by its opening track, in this case “Telephone Operator”. The sole remaining unrecorded original song from Shelley’s Jets Of Air days – YouTube footage shows them playing it in 1973 – it became another cult club hit, but the album’s lack of traction could come down to the fact that as a leading man, Shelley’s coy, happy-go-lucky demeanour didn’t command the same attention as characters like Boy George, Kevin Rowland or George Michael.
Suitably for Shelley, XL-1 is a mixed-up affair (not helped, perhaps, by the revelation in Adamson’s autobiography that he came on to Shelley during the sessions). There are beautifully restrained songs (“Twilight”, “What Was Heaven”), sprightly cuts that sound like Buzzcocks (“You Know Better Than I Know”, “XL1”) and head-spinning electro-funk (“Many A Time”, “If You Ask Me (I Won’t Say No)”). It also came with its own ZX Spectrum program so that computer users could experience the album onscreen as a kind of 8-bit karaoke, which gives you a sense of Shelley’s enthusiasm for technology. This program was designed by Shelley’s longtime pal Joey Headen who would go on to work on video games in the US, including Call Of Duty and a Pac-Man reboot.
Taken together, Homosapien and XL-1 paint a portrait of a young man in the full bloom of life, creating and coming of age on his own terms, with little regard to how it might be perceived. It wouldn’t last, of course, and a few years later Shelley’s next album, the Stephen Hague-produced Heaven And The Sea, fared even worse than XL-1. These Domino reissues – available on vinyl for the first time since their original release – arrive just six years after the two albums were included in Shelley’s The Genetic Years boxset. Both also feature all the dub mixes and extra tracks, and there are no new or unreleased surprises here. But this is more than enough to reflect again on the genius of Shelley, whose hot streak from 1977 to ’83 is still underappreciated. These reissues should go some way to setting that record straight – though straight was never the right word for Shelley.
