Surprise punk-cred test: name a Buzzcocks album that isn’t Singles Going Steady. Chances are nothing else popped into your head. Not too shocking, considering Singles has become the band’s dominant work: its both a great entry point and arguably the strongest release of their 30-year career. Released after only two LPs, Singles collects Buzzcocks’ eight UK singles and their B-sides, most of which were penned by the band’s longtime guitarist and singer Pete Shelley. But if you inspect the back of the album, you’ll find a lone writing credit on the very first single, “Orgasm Addict,” attributed to a mysteriously absent individual: Howard Devoto.
What the back cover won’t tell you is that Devoto was more than a onetime collaborator. He was, in fact, a founding member of Buzzcocks, and the band’s singer for their first year of existence. Devoto’s time fronting Buzzcocks didn’t garner the recognition of the Singles-era lineup, but since he quit the band days after their stellar first release, who knows where the group might have gone. Luckily, the sole relic from his stint with the band, the scorching Spiral Scratch EP, provides a glimpse of their early promise.
Spiral Scratch was recorded in one night at the end of December 1976 and released a month later with cash that band members scraped together from friends and family. What cements Spiral Scratch in the pantheon of punk is its release on the band’s own New Hormones label, one of the first independent labels in the punk world (in contrast to major labels like EMI for The Sex Pistols or Columbia for The Clash). But the real reason the Buzzcocks mattered was because their music fit this method so brilliantly: it was snide, twitchy, raw, and viciously self-aware. From the opening of “Breakdown,” where Deveto frantically confessed his shredded nerves over fractured guitars, to the raucous mess of “Friends of Mine,” which flits between rants about “pissing adrenaline” to some ugly-ass whacked-out guitar solos and back again, Spiral Scratch packed as much twisted snarl as possible into its brief length. Listening to the EP’s centerpiece, “Boredom,” it isn’t too hard to understand Devoto’s sudden departure from the punk scene he already found “hum-drum” and “has-been” to move on to his more experimental band, Magazine. In truth, Devoto crammed as much angst-ridden sneer into four songs as other punks have in their entire careers. And it only took him 10 minutes.
