Steve Diggle's long-time coming autobiography, Autonomy: Portrait of a Buzzcock, from Omnibus Books, was published to great acclaim a few weeks ago. An insightful and self aware book, full of wry observation; in the scheme of things, from a man whose band was successful straight away as one of the undisputed architects of the late 70s punk scene in the UK. The Buzzcocks were the first band I ever saw. Initially, they featured Howard Devoto as lead vocalist, but when he left suddenly after the Spiral Scratch EP, Steve and Pete Shelley turned the band of punk originators into a pop-punk powerhouse and one of the most imitated bands of all time. From well, what looked like a seaside promenade somewhere (didn't ask), on the eve of the publication of his book, Steve took time out to chat over Zoom...
OUTSIDELEFT: I love how the book opens... It opens with the capital letters, with the word 'LIFE'. I wondered, you know, how you went from playing bass in your friend's band to lead guitar in the Buzzcocks, and at what point did you realise that what's impossible for most people was going to be possible for you? You were going to have this music career...
STEVE DIGGLE: Well, I grew up all the early 60s music. You know, a child of the 60s sort of. You know, I liked music, liked bands, but had not really thought about joining a band until one day I lost my scooter license at about 16, and I was grounded so I went and learnt guitar. I wasn't really a bass player, I was learning on an old acoustic guitar, but my dad got me a bass by mistake. He nicked off the back of his van! So that's how I became a bass player for a while. When I'd written this song, 'Fast Cars', I thought, I need a band... So I went to meet this guy outside of the Free Trade Hall in Manchester and Malcolm McClaren was outside and he introduced me to Pete Shelley. That's how I met Pete, and then Howard Devoto. We got on really well and rehearsed the next day. I wasn't really a bass player. I did 10 gigs on bass in the early Buzzcock days, and then Howard Devoto left, which was the greatest thing he did for me. At the time it seemed a bit of a shock, but I said, I'll move over to guitar, and that's when I really found my place, as a guitarist, rather than a bass player. That's what became the classic sound and lineup of the Buzzcocks.
"Howard Devoto left, which was the greatest thing he did for me..."
OL: I like that bit in your book, when Howard leaves, and you're all pretty pragmatic about it. You're like, "oh, well, fuck it. We're doing this anyway, right?" That's really exciting, how you made that instant shift.
SD: Yeah, it was that quick. Me and Pete were sitting there with Devoto and he said, "I've made a record, I've seen what I want to do, I'm leaving!" Me and Pete looked at each other and said, "Well, we'll carry on" in an instant, because we had nowhere to go. We'd just formed the band and released the Spiral Scratch EP. So it was a shock but, you know, it wasn't difficult to make that decision. In a sense, and looking back, it was a magical moment. What seemed devastating, suddenly became the right thing to do, because great as Howard was for those first 10 shows, you wouldn't had The Buzzcocks as you know it now. I don't think we would have survived or written those kind of songs. His departure led to me to the guitar, and I had that song 'Fast Cars', which became the first song on the first album, and we started writing 'What Do I Get?' Those kind of songs became what really defined the classic lineup of the Buzzcocks.
OL: Although the music was fast and electric, it wasn't nihilistic and aggressive, like some of the other punk bands. How, how did you sit alongside them? How did you feel about that? Did you ever worry you didn't have their sort of tough, barre chord sound?
SD: At those early shows, during the Spiral Scratch and Orgasm Addict period, we were quite aggressive. We were good with words too. It was like punk poetry what we were doing. We weren't just shouting "give us a job" or complaining about the Government. We knew about the complexities of life and more existential things. We were quite punky when we started, but then we started to write more melodic tunes. We'd done that punk aggression thing and we didn't want to carry on being just that. We started at the same time as The Jam, The Clash and The Damned and there weren't many others around in 1976, so we were part of the nucleus of punk. People at the time thought 'you punks, it's all the same.' They didn't know one from the other at the beginning, but as each band, including The Buzzcocks started putting out more singles and albums, that differentiated between the bands so it wasn't just this umbrella of punk. We defined our own sound, as did the others.
OL's Alan Rider: One of the interesting things about punk is that everybody had to learn really fast. It was a compressed time scale. Were you really good at playing your instruments before you started, or did you have to learn them on the job?
SD: We were great with our limitations. We had a distinctive sound, and could make a four note riff sound important. You know, that was a thing. We knew we could write great songs, even if we didn't tell each other that at the time. It was like, 'these songs are great! Nobody's got songs like this. Punk was just a vehicle to get the attitude and the idea across. There were some dumb people on the scene too, but they were just there for the party. Looking back, we were really good players, and we never really needed to work that hard at doing that. It's just that we were. We had a great singer, great bass player, and we had me and Pete on the guitar. It was an incredible time, looking back. We never had to worry about the musicianship, because looking back, we were great musicians in our own way. We had an individual style. A lot of musicians just ape other musicians, and never find their own sound. They try and play like Jimmy Page or Chuck Berry, and that's as far as they get, because they're not consciously aware what they're doing. They're what I call musicians in name only. We were a bit more than musicians. In fact, we didn't class ourselves as musicians in such a broad way.
OL's Alan Rider: You were also responsible for that famous one note guitar solo on 'Boredom' that gave us all confidence that we didn't need to be Jimmy Page to play a guitar solo!
SD: That kind of stuff actually came from an acoustic guitar accident. The guitar I learnt on had been hung up on the wall, it was actually a souvenir from Spain. Every time I tuned it up and struck a chord, it went out of tune. So I learned to play Beethoven's Ninth on one string! The great thing looking back was, so instead of giving up, I just jammed on a couple of strings, and I developed a style of my own.
OL: One of one of our writers saw you when you were touring on the White Riot Tour with The Clash, and he said to us it was a life changing moment. He was really amazed because you had the same guitar as him. Do you still have old stuff like that? In the book you have a great story about Joe Strummer turning up next night with a machine head in his pocket to give to you to fix your guitar he had broken...
SD: I had a Woolworths guitar, which were terribly made things, but it was my guitar and it broke. Normally musicians will carry spare plectrums around, but not machine heads [the things with pegs on the head of a guitar that tighten the strings to tune them up]. We had played in Manchester, and were due to play the Rainbow in London the next night, and I went up to him and said "Joe, you've broken my machine head". He reached into his pocket and pulled out a machine head and said "will this do?". It was a little cheap plastic thing, you know, off a Spanish guitar. Nobody had a screwdriver, but Pete Shelley had a nail file, so he scratched the lovely paintwork off the guitar, then screwed this thing on with it. So it was played by me, broken by Joe Strummer, and repaired by Pete Shelley! That guitars' got a lot of history, and yes, I've still got it. I had a 1959 Les Paul after that, but that got stolen out of the car so I don't have that now, but it used to belong to Tony Hicks from the Hollies. When I bought it, I took it to the studio, which Tony Hicks was recording at too, and just as I was taking it out of the box, he stuck his head round the door and said "that's my guitar!" so I thought ‘I've just bought a stolen guitar!’ The great thing about that guitar was that when I played it through this valve amp they had in the big room in the studio, it sounded quite distinctive.
[That guitar] "...was played by me, broken by Joe Strummer, and repaired by Pete Shelley! That guitar's got a lot of history, and yes, I've still got it."
OL: You don't see so many of those old H&H amps around that you guys used anymore.
SD: They are around a bit. I've still got my original one, which is about 45 years old now, and then I bought one on tour from eBay. The Bass combo of that matches my H&H one. I've never used it, but I know I've got a back line of H & H's if I need it. It just looks beautiful.
OL: They had very distinct logo that lit up, with a backlight.
SD: That green illuminated light thing, which looked amazing. Around that time I was reading 'I Robot' by Asimov, and I used to call them my little robots, because when you were plugged in with the reverb switch on, if you moved it, it made a crashing sound, which was a very distinctive sound. On our first album a lot of the songs were done using those H&H amps as they were unique.
OL: Were they reliable? Did they break down a lot?
SD: They were very reliable. They were transistor amps. A little bit later on, we moved on to Marshalls, which, as you know, you have to change the valves on now and again, but the H&H's went on forever. They were thrown around on The Clash White Riot tour. They went everywhere. They were so robust. Quite magical things, they were.
OL: People have got that thing, haven't they? Now they don't want transistors. They only want valves. They're kind of snobby,
SD: Yeah, even at the shop in Manchester, when we bought them, they were saying ‘why do you want these cheap little things when you could have Marshalls and Fenders and stuff?’. And we said ‘no, we want those’. As I said, particularly on the first album, they gave us a very unique sound. Like you say, there is a snobbery sometimes about musical equipment. But then again, if you think outside the box, like we were doing at the time, then you come up with different ideas and different things by not going down a conventional route, so they worked out well for us, you know.
OL: Do you have a favorite guitar that when you play gigs you wouldn't take with you, because I saw Nadine Khouri playing recently, who I knew had this really beautiful guitar, but when I went to see her play, she didn't have that with her, and I said, "what about your other Gibson thing?" She said "I'm on tour. I'm leaving it at home." Because obviously the road can be a tough place for good guitars...
SD: I've got a 1954 Les Paul Gold Top
OL: Good god, is it in a safe?
SD: It's safe enough, but you know, you can't take and leave that lying about anywhere. I have about 100 guitars though. When you're getting older and traveling around America, you get a collection over the years, you know? It's like clothing, really, buying a new shirt or a pair of shoes. I need that kind of guitar. You can always tell them, the ones that have bought the wrong guitar. It doesn't suit them. I walk into a guitar shop, walk around the shop and it is like a spiritual thing, to be guided to a certain guitar. Maybe it's just me, but it's weird, I know that's the guitar for me. But when someone buys a guitar to look cool, I think 'you're not a Stratocaster man'. It doesn't look cool. I mean, it might sound good, but I think it all goes hand in hand with the psychology of what you're playing as well. I think it is important to be aware of that, you know.
OL: I never really liked Stratocasters, and then I got one about six months ago, not a particularly valuable one, but a slightly old one, 20 years old. Now I just play it the whole time because it doesn't matter if I bump it into anything around the house or whatever. It is fine.
SD: I'm just saying certain people don't look right with some guitars. All the guitars are good, but when you see somebody playing the wrong guitar on the stage, there's me thinking 'something is not right there'. It's like they are coming out with odd pairs of shoes on.
OL: I went to see my friend's band, and singer/guitarist, had this Telecaster with the worst finish I think I'd ever seen on a guitar, and I thought, ‘well, there's got to be something wrong with that guy'!
SD: Yeah, there's something about that. When it looks right, you think 'that guys got the right psychology for the songs', they look convincing. I was on the Sunset Strip, years ago, Sunset Boulevard, looking for a white Telecaster at the time, and I bought this Mexican one. I thought 'that'll do for the tour', but somewhere along the line, one of our roadies changed the pickups. He's not sure whether he put Gretch pickups on it or what, and we still don't know. When I got home, I left it in the box for a long time, but when I opened up the box and tried it, it was head ripping. I thought 'This sounds amazing! Why didn't I use this before?' That guitar went round the world with me. At the end of each show, I would throw it up in the air and the roadie would catch it. You can only do that in the moment, at the end of a show. If I was doing that in my garden, I would probably get it wrong. So that guitar has got cracks and waves in it. I've semi-retired it now, but that one has done a lot of service. I have a lot of guitars, and every time I buy a new guitar, though, it’s like meeting a new woman for the first time. I have to write a song on it to christen it. Each guitar is different so I come up with different things with different guitars.
OL: I follow you on Twitter, and recently you were complaining about people having a go at you for singing the songs that Pete wrote.
SD: You should never have a drink and go on Twitter! It was just that when Pete died and we carried on, someone said I shouldn't be singing those songs. Many of the songs we performed on that tour were songs I'd written, or we had written together. It wasn't just repeating the old Buzzcocks stuffs. If anyone has a problem with me singing my own songs, well, that's what I'm doing, you know? I'm not stepping on anyone's toes. They said ‘how can you carry on without Pete’? That was all six years ago now and I've not really said anything about that, but I’ve never answered to anyone about what I do with my life. I'm not listening to some fucking window cleaner telling me what I can and can't sing! If they don't like it, don't come and see us. Don't waste good money just to come along and complain! I'm happy to play any song from our back catalogue. We had a new album out last year, which a lot of our fans loved, and we play three or four from that too. I'd rather play those than the old ones really. I only play those to keep people happy and it’s a pleasure to do them. 'Another Protocol' really destroyed the doubters though, and thank god for that! That whole situation was a long time gone though, and we've moved on now.
Alan Rider (OL): You are about to head to the US and Canada for a tour. I see on one of those dates you are supporting The Circle Jerks and The Descendents. Surely you were at this before they started their bands, so should really have first dibs on headlining?
SD: On most of the tour we are headlining our own gigs, but we are doing a festival with them. They can headline, but they know who the masters are (laughs) and they are all big fans of The Buzzcocks, so its ok. It's the way it is.
OL: Are you still drinking champagne before every show?
SD: Yes. I need to cut down on that really!
Essential Information
Main image by Brian Marks from wikicommons
STEVE DIGGLE
Autonomy: Portrait of a Buzzcock
