My Top 40 Songs of 1980

Joy Division : Love Will Tear Us Apart

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While you were living in 2020, I spent the year, musically at least, in 1980 where some artists also felt depressed, mostly about the state of the world in the midst of a cold war and leaders who were looking after the rich rather than the working people. An amazing year,  I could have easily made a Top 100 songs of the year. I'm just starting to look at 1981 and there's no way it can compete.

1. Joy Division : Love Will Tear Us Apart

2. David Bowie: Ashes To Ashes

3. The Jam: Going Underground

4. The Pretenders : Talk Of The Town

5. The Cure : A Forest

6. Echo And The Bunnymen : Rescue

7. Kurtis Blow : The Breaks

8. NRBQ : Me And The Boys

9. Squeeze: Another Nail In My Heart

10. Robert Palmer: Looking For Clues

11. The Sound : Heyday

12. The Beat : Mirror In The Bathroom

13. Devo:  Whip It

14. Peter Gabriel Games Without Frontiers

15. The Pretenders : Brass In Pocket

16. Magazine : Song From Under The Floorboards

17. The Clash : Train In Vain

18. Talking Heads : Once In a Lifetime

19. Bruce Springsteen : Hungry Heart

20. Joy Division : Atmosphere

21. Split Enz: I Got You

22. Bush Tetras: Too Many Creeps

23. U2 : I Will Follow

24. Bob Marley and the Wailers : Could You Be Loved

25. Mission of Burma : Academy Fight Song

26. Martha and the Muffins : Echo Beach

27. Lipps Inc : Funkytown

28. The Jam : Start!

29. Blondie: Call Me

30. XTC : Generals and Majors

31. Prince: Dirty Mind

32. Roxy Music : Same Old Scene

33. Diana Ross : I'm Coming Out

34. Donnie Iris : Ah! Leah

35. John Lennon/Yoko Ono : (Just Like) Starting Over/ Kiss Kiss Kiss

36. Ambrosia : Biggest Part Of Me

37. Japan : Gentlemen Take Polaroids

38. Pylon : Cool/Dub

39. Siouxsie and The Banshees : Happy House

40. Jim Carroll Band : People Who Died

NME albums list

Joy Division : Heart And Soul

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Joy Division's Closer tops the 1980 NME album list, edging out Elvis Costello's R+B tribute Get Happy!!, The Beat's debut I Just Can't Stop It and Black Uhuru's Sinsemilla. Over the years, critics have changed their minds about quite a few of the albums on this list: PIL's Printemps Au Paris, Lou Reed's Growing Up In Public, Iggy Pop's Soldier and Aerosmith's Night In The Ruts don't hold up with the best of what these artists have achieved. The same goes for Ry Cooder's Borderline and Ian Dury's Laughter. And some of those also-rans deserve to be higher up in the chart. That said, this list will be closer to my Top 40 which I will reveal next week. 

1980 NME Albums 

1. Closer - Joy Division 

2. Get Happy - Elvis Costello 

3. I Just Can't Stop It - The Beat 

4. Sinsemilla - Black Uhuru 

5. Movies - Holger Czukay 

6. Remain In Light - Talking Heads 

7. Crocodiles - Echo And The Bunnymen 

8. Borderline - Ry Cooder 

9. Scary Monsters - David Bowie 

10. Searching For The Young Soul Rebels - Dexys Midnight Runners 

11. Sound Affects - The Jam 

12. The River - Bruce Springsteen 

13. Signing Off - Ub40 

14. The Correct Use Of Soap - Magazine 

15. Songs The Lord Taught Us - The Cramps 

16. Laughter - Ian Dury & The Blockheads 

17. Night Passage - Weather Report 

18. Grace And Danger - John Martyn 

19. Empires And Dance - Simple Minds 

20. Suicide - Suicide 

21. Uprising - Bob Marley & The Wailers 

22. Warm Thoughts - Smokey Robinson 

23. Colossal Youth - Young Marble Giants 

24. Printemps Au Paris - Public Image Ltd. 

25. Voice Of America - Cabaret Voltaire 

26. Warm Leatherette - Grace Jones 

27. Die Kleinen Und Die Bosen - D.A.F. 

28. Soldier - Iggy Pop 

29. Toots Live - Toots And The Maytals 

30. Growing Up In Public - Lou Reed 

31. Doc At The Radar Station - Captain Beefheart 

32. More Specials - The Specials 

33. Cultosaurus Erectus - Blue Oyster Cult 

34. Kilimanjaro - The Teardrop Explodes 

35. Blues For The Fisherman - Milcho Leviev & Art Pepper 

36. Shiny Beast - Captain Beefheart 

37. Nobody’s Perfect -Stiff Little Fingers

38. Hotter Than July - Stevie Wonder 

39. Snap Crackle & Bop - John Cooper Clarke 

40. Bass Culture - Linton Kwesi Johnson 

41. Organisation - Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark 

42. Countrymen - The Twinkle Brothers 

43. Freedom Of Choice - Devo 

44. Are You Glad To Be In America - James Blood Ulmer 

45. Diana - Diana Ross 

46. Shadows And Light - Joni Mitchell 

47. Kaleidoscope - Siouxsie And The Banshees 

48. Waiting For A Miracle - Comsat Angels 

49. Heartattack And Vine - Tom Waits 

50. Changes - Etta James 

 Also Mentioned • 

Real People - Chic • 

Gyrate - Pylon • 

Off The Coast Of Me - Kid Creole And The Coconuts • 

Absolutely Madness - Madness • 

Black Sea - Xtc • 

Travelogue - The Human League • 

Return Of The Durutti Column - Durutti Column • 

In Performance - Donny Hathaway • 

Phantom Tracks - Roy Loney • 

The Long Riders - Ry Cooder • 

Deguello - Zz Top • 

The Art Of Walking - Pere Ubu • 

Night In The Ruts - Aerosmith • 

Jeopardy - The Sound • 

Rev Up - The Revillos • 

Betrayal - Jah Wobble • 

Orchestral Manoeuvres In The Dark - Same • 

Cristina - Same • 

Do Animals Believe In God - Pink Military • 

Boy - U2 • 

Peter Gabriel - (3) • 

Argybargy - Squeeze • 

Taking Liberties - Elvis Costello • 

Commercial Album - The Residents

 

Joy Division's Closer is a breathtaking trip into darkness

Joy Division : Isolation

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On July 18, 1980 Joy Division released Closer, the band's final album and one that is impossible to separate from the tragic circumstances of frontman Ian Curtis's suicide. It would be years before we learned what led to the tailspin that ended with Curtis hanging himself May 18, 1980:  his worsening grand mal seizures due to epilepsy, his marriage falling apart and the pressure to try to shelve all of his troubles away to prepare for the band's first American tour. 

In retrospect the album reads like a suicide note but at the time the young members of the band really weren't paying attention to the lyrics.

"We'd go to rehearsals and sit around and talk about really banal things," says guitarist Bernard Sumner."We'd do that until we couldn't talk about banal things any more, then we'd pick up our instruments and record into a little cassette player. We didn't talk about the music or the lyrics very much. We never analysed it." 

They have all had to carry on with a certain amount of guilt, especially as the album's legacy has grown. Bass player Peter Hook says "people that are left behind are the ones that suffer".

The cover of the album is a photograph of a family tomb, selected before Curtis's death.

The band were not happy with producer Martin Hannett's studio wizardry but his reverb and delay treatments are  part of what makes the album so haunting. It sounds like it was recorded behind the "doors of hell's darker chambers".

Closer has become one of the best regarded albums of the entire decade. This review is from Smash Hits.

The band never got to promote Closer. They barely had time to grieve before reforming as New Order, adding drummer Stephen Morris' girlfriend Gillian Gilbert on keyboards.

In 2011 Peter Hook finally got to play some of the Closer songs live, standing next to his son. He said he got chills down the spine and that it was a wonderful moment he wished he could share with the other band members.

Joy Division releases "Love Will Tear Us Apart", the song of the year

Joy Division : Love Will Tear Us Apart

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On June 27, 1980 Joy Division released "Love Will Tear Us Apart". It entered the UK charts at #45 on the 29th. Released a month after Ian Curtis's suicide, this is the most memorable and celebrated single of 1980. It is also the saddest. A breakup song with lyrics full of misery (Why is the bedroom so cold?/ Turned away on your side) and a beat that welcomes everyone to the dance floor. 

"Love Will Tear Us Apart" was named NME Single of the Year in 1980, and was listed as the best single of all time by NME in 2002. Rolling Stone critics named it the best single of the year ands The Village Voice Pazz and Jop Critic's Poll ranked the single #2 behind Kurtis Blow's "The Breaks".

Recording the song was a marathon, in the words of bassist Peter Hook. Drummer Stephen Morris recalls getting awakened at 4 AM by producer Martin Hannett to come back into the studio to play snare drum. 

Hook says Hannett 

kept remixing it and must have done it ten to fifteen times; then (Factory Records owner )Tony Wilson pulled the plug on him because it was costing so much money. Martin was never happy with it and kept searching , constantly , for the great mix He tried different engineers but could never get the definitive mix. Funnily enough, I now don't like the mix he eventually chose for the single, I like the one that's got a dead-loud guitar over-dub on it, a radio mix.

Its title etched on Curtis' gravestone, "Love Will Tear Us Apart" can't be separated from its circumstances. Curtis is witnessing the end of his marriage, suffering an increasing number of epileptic fits, and is losing his interest in life.  In the Spin Alternative Record Guide, Evelyn McDonnell writes "this pop song seemed to hurl its burden of prophetic tragic doom heavenward." 

Remembering Ian Curtis

Joy Division : Twenty Four Hours

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On May 18, 1980 Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis took his own life at the age of 23, leaving behind a wife, a child and a musical legacy that has only grown over time. Curtis had been suffering from depression and epilepsy.

This post is hardly the only remembrance of this sad day. Peter Hook is marking the anniversary by streaming a 2015 gig in which he played every Joy Division song with his band The Light. The show will debut online across both Joy Division’s and The Light’s Youtube and Facebook channels. Although it will be free, fans are asked to make a donation to The Epilepsy Society.

Hook’s fellow surviving Joy Division bandmates Bernard Sumner and Stephen Morris will also be hosting an event to celebrate Curtis. The  free online event, ‘Moving Through the Silence: Celebrating The Life and Legacy of Ian Curtis’, will raise money for the Manchester mental health charity Manchester Mind and help mark the beginning of Mental Health Awareness Week.

As Hook relates in his memoir Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division was getting ready to tour America, home to Curtis' favorite bands The Doors, Lou Reed and Iggy Pop. (Pop's The Idiot is apparently the last album Curtis ever heard.)

So, yes, I drove him home that Friday night and he was cock-a-hoop, full of it. We’d had a great practice and I was dropping him off. We were laughing and joking and every now and then one of us would go, ‘I can’t believe we’re fucking going to America!’ We were screaming in the car, jumping up and down on the seats, properly shouting, whooping, hollering: ‘Yeah! America!’
No ‘rather die’ about it.
This was on the Friday night. We were due to leave after the weekend. If the silly bugger hadn’t killed himself we would have been on a plane to America on Monday. If he’d known all along that he planned to kill himself, as some say he did, was he just putting it on, all that excitement? Was he that good an actor?

A last second addition to a Smash Hits issue in May of 1980

As it has been pointed out many times, the lyrics of the forthcoming album, Closer, read like suicide notes to bandmates.  In "Twenty-Four Hours", Curtis sings

Just for one moment, thought I'd found my way. 

Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away.

Looked beyond the day in hand, there's nothing there at all. 

Now that I've realized how it's all gone wrong, 

Gottas find some therapy, this treatment takes too long. 

Deep in the heart of where sympathy held sway, 

Gotta find my destiny, before it gets too late.

 

Joy Division's ultra-rare single

Joy Division: Atmosphere

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On March 18, 1980 Joy Division released their rare "Licht und Blindheit" single in France on the Sordide Sentimental label, which combined art, music and text in a lavish fold-out folder that featured text by label founder Jean-Pierre Turmel, with the Joy Division 45 inside.  Only 1,578 copies were made. They were sold in shops for 2.50 pounds. On Ebay, the record is posted at 1,1750 pounds. 

On Side A there is the brooding "Atmosphere", one of the band's greatest songs. This is the song DJ John Peel would play after announcing the death of singer Ian Curtis. With its lines "Walk in silence/ Don't walk away, in silence", the song seems to be about Curtis's attempts to reconcile with his unwilling wife after his affair. the song would top the UK Indie charts in October of 1980.

In 1988 the band's photographer and the future director of the bio-pic Control, Anton Corbjin, made a video for the song.

"Dead Souls" reveals Curtis's inner turmoil. His self doubts, his mood swings, his "dual of personalities" that keep calling him. Another great song.

Best of 1979

1979 was a remarkable year for albums and singles. I don 't think we've witnessed a year like that since. In the same year we got The Clash's London Calling, Pink Floyd's The Wall, Gang of Four's Entertainment!, Talking Heads's Fear of Music, Joy Division's Unknown Pleasures and Armed Forces by Elvis Costello and the Attractions. Over the course of the year my admiration for some albums increased, especially Unknown Pleasures, Wire's 154, Pil's Metal Box, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk and The Beat's debut which I wasn't familiar with at the start of the year. Other great discoveries included Tangerine Dream's Force Majeure and Gary Numan's Pleasure Principle, Joe Egan's Out of Nowhere, and the Toms album. 

Fave Albums 1979

The Clash London Calling
Gang of Four Entertainment!
Talking Heads Fear of Music
Joy Division Unknown Pleasures
Elvis Costello Armed Forces

Wire 154
PiL Metal Box
Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers Damn the Torpedoes
Graham Parker Squeezing Out Sparks
Fleetwood Mac Tusk

XTC Drums and Wires
The Beat
Joe Jackson Look Sharp
The Specials
Sparks No 1 Song in Heaven

Tangerine Dream Force Majeure
Robert Fripp Exposure
The Cars Candy O
Gary Numan Pleasure Principle
The B 52's

Fave Singles

Joy Division Transmission
The Clash London Calling
Wire Outdoor Miner
The Cure Boys Don't Cry
Buzzcocks Everybody's Happy Nowadays/Why Can't I Touch It

XTC Making Plans for Nigel
The Specials Gangsters
Talking Heads Life During Wartime
The Pop Group She is Beyond Good and Evil
The Ruts Babylon's Burning

Undertones Teenage Kicks
Blondie Heart of Glass
Nick Lowe Cruel to be Kind
Prince I Wanna Be Your Lover
Squeeze Up the Junction

Gary Numan Cars
Michael Jackson Don't Stop Til You Get Enough
Chic Good Times
Sugarhill Gang Rappers Delight
Sparks The Number One Song in Heaven

    On Social Media

Promoting this page on Twitter has been fun this year with retweets, likes and responses from Graham Parker, Eric Idle, The Mekons, Gang of Four, Bebe Buell, Mark Stewart of The Pop Group and these two, from Cher and Feargal Sharkey.

Paul Weller's All Time Top Ten

The Jam : Burning Sky

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While promoting Setting Sons, The Jam's Paul Weller took a moment to provide his all time Top 10 song list to a December 1979 edition of Smash Hits. 

Among the bands featured is The Nips, the first band of future Pogues frontman Shane MacGowan

Fellow Mod revivalists Purple Hearts get a nod. They hit the scene just a bit to be as big as they deserved.

Gang of Four's "Waiting For My Elevator" is performed below with members of the Mekons. I don't believe they ever recorded the song. Let me know if I'm wrong.

Anticipating the Stray Cats, Whirlwind's "Boppin' High School Baby" was actually released in 1977.

I still think "Transmission" might be the best song of 1979 though Weller didn't consult me. Almost never does. 

And We Could Dance

Joy Division : Transmission

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On October 7 , 1979 Joy Division released the single "Transmission". Regarding this song Peter Hook once said "We were doing a soundcheck at the Mayflower, in May, and we played 'Transmission': people had been moving around, and they all stopped to listen. I realized that was our first great song."

In its list of "The 200 Best Songs of the 1970s"  Pitchfork ranked "Transmission" #10. Marc Master writes:
"Transmission” is not a celebration so much as a warning: all the people who “dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio” are powerless followers led by whatever they’re fed. That Curtis and his bandmates delivered such a bleak message through such heart-quickening sound—the kind that, ironically enough, is impossible not to move your body too—shows just how much power Joy Division could generate

The single is ranked the second best of 1979 by Rate Your Music, just behind "London Calling. One contributor writes :

Imagine turning on your favourite TV pop show in 1979 and seeing this! I’d actually vote Ian here for one of the ten bests screams in rock. “…and we could daaaaaaaance…”

The B-side is "Novelty":

Lights Are Flashing, Cars Are Crashing

Joy Division : Disorder

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On June 15, 1979 Factory Records released Unknown Pleasures, Joy Division's debut album. The only Joy Division album released during singer Ian Curtis's lifetime, it has grown in status every decade. Unknown Pleasures has now topped the user reviewed database Rate Your Music as the top album of 1979, over London Calling, The Wall, Fear of Music and Entertainment!.

In 1979 NME's Max Bell called the album with its distinctive dark cover "memorably psychotic", writing:

All the material bears the mark of obsession and personal experience; it's stark, alarmingly defiant. Curtis delivers his parts with dramatic flatness, as semi-chants, matter-of-fact monologues, pushing out the meaning in spurts...Unknown Pleasures is an English rock masterwork, its only equivalent probably made in Los Angeles 12 years ago: The Doors' Strange Days, the most pertinent comparison I can make. Listen to this album and wonder because you'll never love the sound of breaking glass again.

Some of the credit for the lasting appeal of Unknown Pleasures belongs to producer Martin Hannett. The album has a spacious and atmospheric sound that contrasted with the band's live performances. At first the band members resented what Hannett had done. This is Bernard Sumner:

The music was loud and heavy, and we felt that Martin had toned it down, especially with the guitars. The production inflicted this dark, doomy mood over the album: we'd drawn this picture in black and white, and Martin had coloured it in for us.

But Peter Hook would later say "There's no two ways about it, Martin Hannett created the Joy Division sound."

It was also Hook, who in 2011, revealed how Factory owner Tony Wilson and band manager Rob Gretton bought Curtis a greatest hits album by Frank Sinatra hoping Curtis would take some tips from the legendary vocalist's way with melancholy tunes. You can judge whether it worked:

There was a song called "I Remember Nothing" and the lyric is "We were strangers" and I thought to myself "Ah, he got it from Frank Sinatra" because he didn't have any words for it and he had been listening to the Frank Sinatra album downstairs in Strawberry ( Studios) and I think that was a direct rip.

The album was praised by most critics ( although Melody Maker's Mary Harron wasn't so impressed:"I found at least half of it to be turgid and monotonous, and the vocals heavy and melodramatic—Jim Morrison without flair.") but failed to enter the U.K. charts.  

Today you'll find Unknown Pleasures getting near unanimous praise, as one of the 1970's greatest debut albums. It's taken 40 years but, as some have said, it's a grower. 

Left to Blind Destruction

Joy Division : Transmission ( Peel Session)

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On January 31, 1979 Joy Division recorded four songs for John Peel's show. They were broadcast on February 14, 1979. Thee songs were "Exercise One", the band's future debut single "Transmission",  and two forthcoming Unknown Pleasures tracks "Insight" and "She's Lost Control". 

Peel had first played Joy Division in March of 1978 but he wasn't as wild about them as he was about other bands. "I didn’t at the time think that Joy Division were a band that I was going to prefer above any other," he told author John Walters. "They were just one of a whole handful of bands whose work I was quite enjoying at that time."

The band grew on him. Peel would play Joy Division 34 times in 1979 . In 2000 he would declare the single, "Atmosphere", the #1 all time song among his Festive Fifty, ahead of the song he was best known for championing,  The Undertones' "Teenage Kicks". 

Day In, Day Out

Joy Division : Digital

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In December of 1978 the Manchester based Factory Records label released an EP titled A Factory Sample, the label's first official release. The bands sampled are Joy Division ("Digital" and "Glass") , The Durutti Column ( a pair of lost classics) , John Dowie ( who?)  and Cabaret Voltaire, all of whom played at a club known as The Factory in Manchester. The label would give us not just the bands above but also New Order, A Certain Ratio, Happy Mondays, Northside, and (briefly) Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark and James. Sadly, "Digital" is the last song Joy Division ever performed together, 16 days before singer Ian Curtis killed himself. 

Infiltrate Imagination

Joy Division : Leaders of Men

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On September 20, 1978, the Manchester band Joy Division made their television debut performing "Shadowplay" on Granada TV's "Granada Reports". The song would appear on the group's 1979 debut album, Unknown Pleasures. It takes a short while before Ian Curtis loses him in the music. His joyous dancing always offered a stark contrast to his lyrics.

At this point, in 1978, Joy Division had only released An Ideal For Living, an EP many fans disregard because the band has yet to find their sound and nobody quite understands the Aryan symbolism. Though recorded in 1977, when the band was still calling itself Warsaw, it's worthy of your 12 and a half minutes.

 It kicks off with "Warsaw", a Mancunian punk rocker that sounds like something the Buzzcocks might have recorded. Curtis is singing at a higher range throughout the EP. The second song is  "No Love Lost", with its then unheard of two minute instrumental opening. Flip it over, and the B side begins with "Leaders of Men", my favorite song on the EP. The record ends with more punk rock. "Failures (of the Modern Man)".

No Impact Whatsoever

Joy Division : Warsaw

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On May 29, 1977 a band calling themselves Stiff Kittens made their debut at the bottom of the  billing on an evening at the Electric Circus in Manchester. By the time Sounds reviewer Ian Wood began writing the review, they had already disposed of the name suggested by Buzzcock Pete Shelley and changed their name to Warsaw. They would best be known as Joy Division until the lead singer took his own life in 1980. The remaining members formed New Order. Wood was unimpressed to say the least, citing Mary Whitehouse, a moral crusader who sued movie theaters ( over "Blow Up") and wrote letters to Top of the Pops ( over Chuck Berry singing "My Ding a Ling"). 

Buzzcocks/Penetration/John Cooper Clark/Stiff Kittens Manchester, Electric Circus 

SCENE. Middle-class, middle-aged (well, over 20), has-been rocker sent off to review punk gig. Can he stand it? Ummm . . . But can he understand it? Doubtful, doubtful. But for what it's worth, the first act Stiff Kittens a.k.a. Warsaw a.k.a. whatever-they're-called-next-week rate zero even on my Mary Whitehouse odorometer. The guitarist must be some refugee from a public school, the neatest thing about the bassist is his headgear and the singer has no impact whatsoever. By the fifth number or so they can just about put together a coherent riff, but I don't think even the most demented headbanger could get off to this. Someone tells me it's their first gig. So let's pass over the rest. Next, please. 

And next happens to be the poet, John Cooper Clark. This isn't a poetry column, but whoever programmed this gig deserves a medal, for Clark is a local genius, normally found at Stuffy arts gathering. Yet his lines have the same attack of Rotten or Strummer, with the advantage of a sense of metre and a polysyllabic vocabulary. Plus the fact that he knows what he's talking about. He could be a revelation for the blank generation. 'You Never See A Nipple In The Daily Express' is an acid and deadly put down of all that the establishment stands for: ignorance, double-standards and hypocrisy. For 'Salome At The Ritz' we have a floor show. 'Salome', dark mac and white shades, strips off as the story progresses, revealing herself ... to be a boy. The kids at front don't believe it. 'Salome' toys with a can of Heinz Spagetti. Someone throws beer at his/her genitals and she wraps spaghetti around their lapels. 

Then we have penetration.Scene stealers, Penetration - (Dont Care collection) No, Penetration, from Durham. Lift-off. This band are killers. There's a she-vixen of a singer with a great voice, a guitaist with a superb feel for dynamics and some totally original licks quite unlike anyone else you care to name. The bassist, who's about 6'6" and the drummer play hard, fast and never miss a lick. In comparison with say the Pistols, on their first visit to this town 9 months-ago, Penetration are way, way ahead. They could knock a ferret dead at six paces. A and R men, please note. 

Finally we read the Buzzcocks. They lack the technical sturm und drang of Penetration, but then this isn't what the Buzzcocks are about. They don't so much parodise the hoopla and hype that surrounds the New Wave, merely ignore it. Pete Shelley writes teen-anthems. With his mock-leopardskin top and sawn off Woolies guitar, you can tell the guy has a sense of humour. Especially when halfway through the set he has to borrow some string for his guitar. 'Orgasm Addict', 'Fast Cars', 'Breakdown' and 'Oh! Shit' are simple (but not dumb) vignettes drawn from life today but about the other side of life for kids everywhere. And then there's the classic 'Boredom', with that classic two note solo. It's a pity though that the limitations of their equipment don't seem, on this evening at least, to let the subtleties shine through, for the other 'Cock: aren't merely a vehicle for Shelley. Collectively, Buzzcocks (the others are Garth on bass, Steve Diggle on rhythm and John Maher on drums) have real Northern Soul, y'know, and they're streets ahead of any of the other Manchester New Wave 'Devolution' (sic) you may have read about elsewhere. But is there understanding south of Potters Bar? Parlez-vous Salford?