Early 85 & I'm at a friend's house & a Lego advert comes on the telly during Gary Crowley's Poparound (don't ask), little Lego men furiously negotiating the morning commuter rush. My mate points out that they're (astonishingly) using a plinky-synthed-up version of a Buzzcocks track (Late for the Train, to be precise). I said I'd never heard it, & my mate replied that no, maybe not, it's off Love Bites, the one everyone forgets about. We listened to it before heading out that night, & sure enough, I forgot about it. Had Another Music, Different Kind of Tension & Singles Going Steady for ages, but only picked up Love Bites two or three years back, in a 2-hand scree of purchases one particularly-solvent afternoon.

All this tedious reminiscence only intended to back up the theory that even a weel-kent crew like Buzzcocks can have their shadowy, unsung moments. & recently, I've been returning to Love Bites in a way that hints there's more to it than I previously suspected. My defence goes something like this...

I suppose it must have been roundabout this time (late 1978) that Pete Shelley was doing his sleevenotes to Cannibalism. Something in Love Bites suggests a renewed fascination with the modal & repetitive over the trad wan-too-free-fow of the day. Howard Devoto was always credited with the intellectual schmeer simply because Magazine were more in aspic and inverted-comma'd. Seems obvious in retrospect that the Buzzcocks were as much of a conceit (not a criticism, incidentally), perhaps more effective for the subversive affect of a catchy melody & a flip, offhand manner.

Love Bites moves sideways from the gnomic, more tongue-in-cheek manoeuvres of Another Music in a Different Kitchen, & meanders pleasingly in a way you can only do when you're beyond the shoehorn of the 45 format (not to decry the sheer impact of a great single, & I'd have to say the Buzzcocks made more effective use of 7-inch vinyl than most you could mention). It reaches away from the tropes of macho-poonk & looks longingly towards a meditative neu/can-ishness. It's particular charm is that it's stranded somewhere inbetwen the two, entirely appropriate for an album that concerns itself with the maddening circular logic of romance, all brittle detail & uncertain context. If Another Music was still somehow acceptable to the doctrinaire contemporary punk, then Love Bites is the distaff twin. (Quoting Jon Savage here, "A slight loss of energy, sure, but... perceptual quirks... hypnotic... a modern psychedelia")

Real World opens the album like they've carried on playing Pulsebeat since the first LP stopped, but have now come round again & spied a katchy toon that'll allow them to escape the loop. Then it's straight into Ever Fallen in Love. Now, you probably know this one, but if you're like me, you've heard it so often that you cease to recognise the essential wrongfooting & angst of it, the way it reflects the nagging to-&-fro of an unrequited affair (& in passing, if anyone out there ever finds themselves stood next to Roland Gift, give the bastard a chinese burn for the defacement the Fine Young Cannibals performed upon it). Beautifully, they continue this thread of handwringing with Operators Manual, which actually seems to sob, falter & recover repeatedly throughout. Whereas Pete Shelley's nasal pretend-blank voice had been something like a mask on earlier tracks, here it seems more like a defence mechanism. Then Nostalgia, & (pls tell me if he borrowed it from someone) but assuming Shelley actually came up with the phrase "Nostalgia for an age yet to come", then he should be knighted. Just a perfect encapsulation of... *that* feeling (you know it), & like Ever Fallen..., just a brilliant sleight of hand, turning something casually epigrammatic into something nearer an unhappy mantra. By this point, things are itchy & punky-BPM, & in this context Just Lust sounds like a cheeky throwback with the comic momentum of a Max Sennett silent comedy, soon countered by the genuinely deep Sixteen Again, a copper-bottomed hit! of a tune with an oddly dead eye. It takes the metaphor of Nostalgia & renders it strangely alien (think about it, the image of "Feeling like I'm almost sixteen again" - it's that "almost" that's disconcertingly specific & apprehensive), & also manages the trick of being a self-reflexive back-glance to their first album (the way side one there ends with 16, itself an admission of the inability to escape adolecence).

Before the second side, a point about the Steve Diggle Quandary. I've no ill-will against him, though I prefer Shelley, but if you've ever heard Harmony in My Head you can grasp my point. There was always a whiff of... I dunno, a certain Jimmy Pursey aroma about Steve Diggle, an ocasional tendency to try too hard. Not really a criticism (he wrote Autonomy, so that's enough for me), but, if you'll allow me an arch comparison: Shelley said he admired Michael Karoli because of his "spidery" guitar -sometimes Diggle was just Boris the Spider.

This is all a convoluted way of saying that Love Bites side two opens with the Steve Garvey instrumental Walking Distance, which has the giddy idiot joy of a Saturday morning kids show, & follows it with Diggle's Love Is Lies, a perfectly fine thing, but here it seems like Ray Davies has just wandered in & done a turn, not really getting the overall feel. I find it helps if I think of it like an old music-hall device, a breather before the home-run & denouement.

Which consists of Nothing Left, ESP & Late for the Train, as fine a fifteen-minutes-or-thereabouts as you can spend. Shelley can sing "Nothing left at all /At all at all at all at all at all" in a keening & bewildered tone without sounding either snotty or self-pitying, quite a tricky pose if you care to consider it. The song itself is a parboiled distillation of the insular riffing elsewhere, seming to hint at a frustration about to spill over. Instead, wonderfully, we get ESP, with a gorgeous, plangent chord sequence & a fantastic, insistent three-note guitar motif, like the two-note solo from Boredom, but lathered right the way through the song, should be irritating but somehow acheives wistfulness, Shelley sounding spent as he sings "Do you believe in ESP?... I do, & I'm trying to reach you", nearly half the song's running time taken up with a slow, slow fade that I can only describe as languid, this dissolve into reverie sharply rebutted by the instrumental Late for the Train, nearly six mins, with one of those fade-out... back-again! tricks in the middle, as feverish as you were allowed to get in new-wave-78. As if the album fades to sleep, only to be caught in one of those dreams that really don't need much interpretation, a worried holding pattern.

Ach. maybe I'm overstating it, but sometimes you find the heartfelt & naive in the oddest places, & this is one. When I lurch towards my Buzzcocks vinyl, I'm still more likely to go for the sterner tones of the second side of Different Kind of Tension, or the quick one off the wrist of Orgasm Addict, but Love Bites is something for those thoughtful, high-tide times, like when you get home from a significant night out, or mid-afternoon on a day off, your mind beginning to riff on something quizzical, unravelling & milling. Here proposed for a small Unsung rosette, as a quiet pleasure (the double-entendre entirely appropriate here).

Reviews Index