(posted by quarsan)
Number Nine You Say You Don’t Love Me – Buzzcocks (Audio) (Lyrics)
The Pride of Manchester. In the early days, punk was a Northern thing, and more specifically, a Manchester thing. We used to go down there, or to Liverpool almost every week. We’d save money by hitching and sleeping in train stations or anywhere we could doss down for a couple of hours.
We saw the Buzzcocks so many times, and they never failed to provide a great night out. They were different to the other bands, in that they had great catchy melodies (I nearly chose the wonderous Walking Distance) and a nice line in self depreciating lyrics. They were one of the few groups who weren’t to cool to sing about failed love affairs. To be honest, that was pretty much all they sang about.
One word describes their music: bittersweet. The genius of Pete Shelly was that he could wrap a sad tale of unrequited love in the honey of a tune that stayed in your head. These guys made songs you could whistle. Most people smile when they think of the Buzzcocks.
But there was an aura about them also. You just liked them, they were not aloof or arrogant. They were ordinary, down to earth guys who treated their fans with kindness and courtesy. I tried to start a school magazine so I wrote off a list of questions to New Hormones and got a handwritten reply from Steve Diggle, with long answers. He’d clearly taken an hour or so to do this. That impressed a very young quarsan.
To this day, they remain a group I feel a great deal of affection for. If the world was fair they would be millionaires and they would sing happy love songs. But the world, they and we lived in wasn’t fair, and our love lives weren’t working out. and they sang about that, and they sang about it in a way that helped us get through heartbreak and have the optimism to risk it all over again.
troubled diva 