On Friday June 4th 1976 Steve Diggle turned up at Manchester’s Lesser Free Trade Hall to meet a guitar player who was looking for a bass player to form a band with. As luck would have it he’s ushered into the venue by Malcolm McLaren who tells him there’s a guitar player who’s looking for a bass player in the venue collecting tickets for the Sex Pistols performance that night. That guitar player wasn’t the one Diggle had planned to meet but it was Pete Shelley and so the long Shelley / Diggle partnership, the backbone of future Buzzcocks, was born. Ignoring the break from early 1981 to late 1989 Buzzcocks spent 42 years releasing some of the most perfect punk-pop records you’ll ever hear and there’s countless articles in various places backing up this point. Then, on December 6th 2018, Pet...
