Saturday 20 December 2003

I mentioned to a journalist the other day that the Buzzcocks' Spiral Scratch was an important milestone in the history of British music, and he laughed. 'No I'm serious' - punk wasn't really about safety pins, gobbing and the pogo, it was about do-it-yourself music, and the Buzzcocks started out as do-it-yourself as it got - packing the records into the sleeves themselves, and with the cover photo being the only one of the two Polaroid snaps they had, in which none of them blinked. It's not as ludicrous as claiming, like Frank Zappa did, that one of the most radical departures of 20th century music was Brian Wilson following chord V with chord II in the Beach Boys' Little Deuce Coupe.