I bought my first Buzzcocks record by mistake. In the disco a few nights earlier, I’d pogoed enthusiastically to ‘Rockwrok’ by Ultravox, without knowing what or who I was pogoing to. Confusing ‘Buzzcock’ for ‘Rockwrok’ in the punk section of the store, I bought ‘What Do I Get?’. I didn’t know what I’d got, but once I got home, I knew it wasn’t Rockwrok. The B-side, ‘Oh Shit!’, summed up my mood perfectly. 

My disappointment soon turned to satisfaction. The record I’d got was brilliant and over the next couple of years I’d buy all Buzzcocks’ other records, the sheet music for ‘Another Music in a Different Kitchen’, and I subscribed to their fanzine. I wanted to write songs like Shelley did. But I soon realised that if I were to do that, I would have to become not just a punk, but a poet and a philosopher too.

Shelley, whose pre-Buzzcocks name was Peter McNeish, once said that he assumed his new name because Shelley was what his parents would have called him if he was a girl. But it would do no harm to share names with a great Romantic poet. Shelley’s songs, like the Romantic’s poems, are all about being true to feeling. And for both the feeling that matters most, the one it matters most to be true to, is love.