414. Buzzcocks - Another Music In A Different Kitchen (1978)

















Track Listing

1. Fast Cars
2. No Reply
3. You Tear Me Up
4. Get On Our Own
5. Love Battery
6. Sixteen
7. I Don't Mind
8. Fiction Romance
9. Autonomy
10. I Need
11. Moving Away From The Pulsebeat

Review

This is an amazing piece of punk music. By this time in the championship Punk is dying but there are some pretty amazing bands who have managed to keep it going with the requisite changes to make it still attractive after the novelty value of stuff like the Sex Pistols died out.

The Buzzcocks hailing from sunny Manchester are definitely one of those bands. Manchester is not all palm trees, coconuts and fine white sand beaches, it also has a pretty good music scene which is really starting to show itself at around this time. We already had Magazine, whose main member, Howard Devoto was a previous member of the Buzzcocks (a name which always brings to mind vibrators) and his ghost is pretty much hovering over this whole album, his name is there on the credits of three tracks here but he certainly had an influence on a lot more.

This is pretty great music, because it doesn't simply stick to the punk ideals of crap musicianship and anger, it is actually extremely well executed, with some interest in experimentation and the lyrics are at times downright romantic. There is a definite lean towards pop here, but just a lean, just enough not to make it Blondie or anywhere near that. An essential album.

Track Highlights

1. Autonomy
2. Fast Cars
3. Moving Away From The Pulsebeat
4. I Don't Mind

Final Grade

10/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

The band was formed in 1975 by guitarist/singer Pete Shelley (real name Peter McNeish) and singer Howard Devoto (real name Howard Trafford), both students at Bolton Institute of Technology (now the University of Bolton). They shared common interests in electronic music, the idiosyncratic work of British musician Brian Eno, and American protopunk groups like The Stooges and The Velvet Underground. In late 1975, Shelley and Devoto recruited a drummer and formed an embryonic version of Buzzcocks that never performed and which dissolved after a number of rehearsals.

Good people

Autonomy: