CityLife

Ale and Arty: Buzzcocks' deliver second chance

RELIVING OLD FAVOURITES: Buzzcocks

FOR 30 years Stuart Brennan has believed that "culture" means "beer and football". The chances of him changing now are much, much slimmer than his waistline, but we at City Life have set the M.E.N. sports writer a task - not to find the new man but to at least discover the new Manchester.

This week he checked out a Manchester music legend as the Buzzcocks played Academy 1:

MANCHESTER'S music revolutions sort of passed me by.

When the Sex Pistols were playing their famous gig at the Lesser Free Trade Hall in 1976, inspiring a whole generation of bright young Mancunian things, I was playing football under a streetlight on a council estate.

As the Smiths came close to causing a manic depressive riot at the bigger Free Trade Hall in 1984 I was exiled in Lancaster, drinking, playing pool and talking crap in the guise of obtaining a university education.

And when the Roses played Spike Island in 1990 I just couldn't be bothered leaving the boozer.

Now, as middle age curls its fleshy finger at me, I feel like I've missed out.

All this greatness around me, and I just wasn't hip to the groove.

Don't get me wrong, I've liked a lot of the music Manchester had produced down the years, but never really got off my hairy arse to go and see history in the making.

Liver

But with bands like the Buzzcocks still knocking around, and still thumping your liver with rock 'n' roll played hard, fast and loud, it's never too late.

This was my first Buzzcocks gig, and it makes you wonder what the boys were like in the flush of youth.

Shelley looks like an anti-rocker, like Alfie Bass doing a Frankie Howerd impression, all rolling eyes and wobbling jowls.

But he whumps that guitar and warbles out those songs with all the control and class of experience.

Steve Diggle was gurning and spitting his way around the stage, looking like one of the bedraggled drunks my older brother used to bring home from the George Hotel on a Saturday night.

It was an ambitious set-list. On their current tour, the band are playing every track from their first two albums 'Love Bites' and 'Another Music In A Different Kitchen' - no less than 30 songs.

Relentlessly

They blasted through them relentlessly, no audience banter allowed other than Diggle's cheery winks and knowing finger-pointing.

The audience was an interesting mix, with ageing punks making up the majority. Now, rather than spit and chuck stuff, they were taking photos on their swish camera-phones - how quickly rebellious youth dissolves into material middle age, eh?

They offered a hasty retreat from a possible hip replacement when the younger breed of fans started the rough stuff down in the mosh pit.

An exchange in the toilets brought it on home. A mid-40s bloke greeted a mid-20s student type: "Didn't know you liked this kind of stuff?"

"Nah, I don't really, but I've brought my mum. She loves them."

He's from a generation that perhaps only knows the Buzzcocks as part of the title of a TV music quiz show, something which irritated Diggle and Shelley when they realised how long-running that show would be.

New generation

They should be glad, as a new generation of fans was in evidence, some of them without their mums.

The mood had been neatly set by another set of portly, age-raddled rockers as London outfit The Lurkers - another punk band to have survived 30 years of Thatcher, new romance and New Labour - warmed everyone up.

Vocalist Arturo Bassick belted out a song, based on the old football hooligan invitation, which could be a Buzzcocks anthem for this tour: "Come and Reminisce If You Think You're Old Enough".

*Next week Stuart is determined not to miss the NEXT Manchester music revolution, as he heads down to the Friends of Manchester Festival at Jabez Clegg, a showcase for up-and-coming Manchester bands.