Pete Shelley, formerly with The Buzzcocks, talks about his latest album — XL-1 — which includes computer codes to produce graphic displays on the Sinclair ZX Spectrum.

It's surprising how the real musical innovators of our time so often turn out to be modest and down-to-earth with a genuine interest in discussing their work and, more importantly, sharing their ideas with others in the same field. Pete Shelley is best known for his period with pioneering Punk/New Wave band The Buzzcocks, and slightly less so for his devotion to The Beatles! Now he's moved on to a sophisticated form of pop which has traded in the punk thrash for a burst of the old Fairlight, and which has close links with the world of personal computing.

With such a varied background and colourful history Pete could be forgiven for having fixed ideas and opinions on life and music, but nothing could be further from the truth. Our interview started with the customary "How did you get started in the music business?", but continued much less formally! Pete's first remembrance of an interest in music went back to the age of 14, when he first picked up a guitar. "It was during the school holidays and I remember it was raining outside." He also started to buy second-hand Beatles records and tried to play along with the music: "I knew all the songs but I had to use one of those 'Easy-to-Play' books for the chords."

It wasn't until the age of 16 that Pete started to write his own material. I asked about the sort of music he was producing at that time, only to learn that certain songs had been retained for updating and inclusion within his more recent recordings. "It's almost like I'm a good chef — you see, I don't throw anything away, I just put it in the fridge and I can come up with little tasty meals at a moment's notice, out of the old songs". One example of this 'deep freeze' approach is the track "Telephone Operator", written when he was in a small band with some friends.

Shades of Punk

The roots of The Buzzcocks can be traced to around this period. It was quite a haphazard business — a note on the college noticeboard which Pete answered along with a few others. They left, and Pete and Howard (the instigator of the whole thing) carried on to form the group. "The style was punk, although there was no such thing then. We did things like 'The Breakdown', 'Boredom', and 'Time's Up', which in time became Punk classics, but originated in Howard's bedroom."

In those embryonic days, Pete's style was influenced by bands like Iggy Pop and The Velvet Underground — "late 60's fringe American". More recently, Pete's musical tastes have moved to The Residents (no pun intended), Michael Rother and the German group "Neu!"

The Buzzcocks played their first gig supporting the Sex Pistols in Manchester. Both bands had similar ideas about music; "it was different from the 'supergroups' who were forming the various permutations ad infinitum. We were getting back to the basics of rock music ". Asked about the bad press that the Pistols received at the time, Pete retorted that he really liked their music and never considered them to be extreme. "Anyway", he continued with a confident air, "as soon as punk was an established musical form, loads of groups were considered to be Punk."

The wide diversity of bands meant it was inevitable that another term should evolve, hence New Wave appeared on the scene. "New Wave was really only a journalist's phrase used to rationalise the fact that there were many different, new styles of music appearing on the scene at the time." After a period of popularity in the New Wave stakes, The Buzzcocks' support began to wane and they found themselves in financial difficulties. By this time they were recording what would have been their fourth album, and after two days producer Martin Rushent suggested that they should continue work at his own studio, Genetic. Pete eventually went there to start afresh on demos for "Homo Sapien", and soon found himself with a complete album. Rather than going back to the band with this news, it seemed easier to leave and to set out on a solo career using strictly his own ideas. Steve Garvey, bassist for The Buzzcocks, now lives in New York, and played on Pete's last tour. Steve Diggle and John Maher have a band called "Flag of Convenience".

Music And Graphics

Pete worked towards the release of the album and began to write songs for what emerged as his second solo LP, XL-1. "I tend to write just as I'm about to fall asleep; lying in bed trying to doze off, an idea will come into my head and usually I just stay where I am and think the idea through and elaborate it. Then in the morning, if I can remember it, I might hum the tune as I'm walking along the street and that way add a nice steady rhythm to it". So how do the graphics fit into the schedule? Well, shortly after Pete started on XL-1 his Sinclair Spectrum computer — on order for quite some time — finally turned up. Whilst trying out the 'spongy' keys, he became particularly interested in the Pause function, which can be used to define a length of time down to 1/50 second. This makes it possible to print out lines of text with a variable gap in time between them. Pete wrote a program in basic which measured the length of time between key presses, so that he could listen to a song and press a key to record the time when he wanted a new line of lyrics to be displayed.

After seeing a computer magazine giving away a flexi-disc with a computer program on it, Pete thought it would be a good idea to tie up computer graphics and music. He consulted "Joey", a friend at Manchester University, who started work on a machine code routine, and they met at weekends to work on program ideas.

Plagues Of Bugs

Synchronising the graphics to the sound produced a few problems. "You have to make some assumptions, basically. One possibility is to assume you're going to be playing back on a deck that's running at the right speed. All the other ways of doing it that were suggested to us involved actually connecting the computer to the record deck — it can be done, but you can't expect everybody to be able to do it, particularly if they've got a music centre. The worst thing about hi-fi is trying to find all the right plugs to fit the sockets in the back!" There could still be a sync problem on XL-1, but one possibility would be to vary the speed of the deck. Other possibilities were considered: "After we'd finished the album we started coming up with ideas, a sort of post mortem on how we could have improved it. I hope that next time we can make everything run more smoothly; we're thinking of putting in a pause command which waits for a pulse before advancing to the next line, or a routine to recalculate all the timing values at the end of the first track if you're a long way out. The other suggestion was to have a scale of possible speeds from 0 to 9, with five as the standard speed. But I'm a bit reticent; I don't think a lot of people would use the computer programs if they had to have the computer linked to the hi-fi. It was hard enough trying to explain that there's a locking groove on the album before the last track and you have to skip over that and record the program onto a cassette and then load that into the computer, and if you said after all that you've got to connect the computer by a wire going into the hi-fi it would be too much!"

XL-1 is not the only record out at the moment carrying a computer program. Chris Sievey's "Camouflage" single for EMI contains a lyrics program, synchronised like Pete's only by careful timing, together with two alternative versions of a games program intended for a 1K or 16K Sinclair ZX 81. Previous to both of these was the independent single by Mainframe, "Radio", which contains a printout message and a graphics program which is exactly synchronised to the song by connection to the computer's analogue port. "The more the merrier as far as I'm concerned," was Pete's opinion, "I hope a lot of other people will start doing it. The point about singles is that the syncing problems don't get too bad, so the next time we use a computer programe it will be on a 12" single. We get a bit more out of the computer by finding ways to make the information in memory more compact, which will allow us more space to do the graphics". Here, Pete reluctantly volunteered that "the program on XL-1 takes up slightly less than 16K, but unfortunately a slight goof means that it won't work on a 16K machine. It was written and developed on a 48K machine and then transferred so that it would work on 16K, but it overwrites one of the system's variables when you put it on a 16K. It's the one that tells the CPU the next variable to go to, and it gets overwritten with a 0. We got the program sorted out just after the album had been pressed, which is bit of a shame because it took a lot of time to get it to fit into 16K." It is possible to generate a 16K version from the 48K version, but you need both machines to do it. Pete says that a 48K-16K translation cassette will be available. Pete is now working on getting his computers to talk to each other, but like many of us he's waiting for Sinclair to come out with their RS232 interface!

Memorable Moments

At this point it suddenly struck me that with all the work that had gone into preparing the graphics to complement the album, there must be some profound meaning behind calling it XL-1 — was it a darkly disguised reference to something from Pete's childhood? Fireball XL-5 perhaps(!) Well, the truth of the matter is that Pete just couldn't remember where the name came from: "There's no logical reason", he said, "it was during a free form session — but I can't remember now".

While Pete pondered this temporary memory lapse, I enquired about the influence that Martin Rushent (Genetic Studios) had on the album. "We work very closely together. He comes up with constructive criticism and sometimes because that's the way I want a song to be I explain to him why I want it to be in — but we very rarely fall out over the thing because most of the time we don't even know what we're doing ourselves. We're still feeling the way, and then we'll see the light at the end of the tunnel and we'll both head towards that." I wondered how this 'light' might be reached, bearing in mind the fact that amongst Genetic's collected equipment (and we won't go into what belongs to who!) is a MC8, a Jupiter 8, a Roland 700 and the not-to-be-missed Fairlight CMI. "Well, you see", explained Pete, "I read all the manuals, Martin doesn't." Quite understandable, considering the immense power and intricacy of the Fairlight, which Pete admitted was in some ways "a bit difficult" to use. He prefers the Synclavier, despite its being around twice the price, though the two machines are hardly comparable — the Fairlight samples, the Synclavier synthesizes. "The good thing about the Synclavier and the Fairlight is that each time they come up with some new software they just stick it in an envelope and mail it to you, constantly updating the machine so that it doesn't get obsolete." All this new technology meant that, especially for XL-1, there was a lot of reading to do, which is probably why it took six months — mostly in the studio — to produce. "We had horrendous problems at the start, when we got the Synclavier, 'cos we couldn't work out how to sync it up with all the other machines. So we spent about two weeks constantly trying to get it to sync up and actually have one which knew what it was doing — it could control everything else."

Picking A Keyboard

Some of the tracks on the album were the result of flights into the fantasy worlds of Fairlight and Synclavier, whilst others stayed quite close to the original ideas. So, how does a guitarist relate to an advanced keyboard instrument like the Synclavier or Fairlight? "You can't really, they're basically for keyboard players, but the reason we were able to do things with them was that they can play themselves. First of all we work out what kind of part we want, whether it's a brass line or something, then we sit around for a while and try out a few ideas. After that we write them out as sheet music, which is where Martin comes in. Being a producer he's dabbled in arrangements. On the other hand, the Synclavier will take a tune, round off the notes and print the whole thing in sheet music form. Sometimes on XL-1 the end result sounded nothing like the basic idea once the machines had got hold of it, but if the results are pleasing to the ear they can be quite valid. Sometimes you make a mistake, but that allows you to explore new paths. I still think there will be people recording and doing demos the old way for some time, but in the electronic music field these machines are opening up new possibilities".

The high technology of XL-1 doesn't imply that Pete has moved entirely away from the guitar. He still enjoys playing his Washburn 12-string, "particularly because it gives me so many ideas. It's very much like the computers in that way!" He doesn't see himself as a keyboard player, despite the achievements of XL-1, but finds that a lot of ideas for his songs come from just playing around on a synthesizer.

Listening to XL-1 you can trace Pete Shelley's musical roots from the melodic origins of The Beatles, through Punk, New Wave and Pop to the present phase of electronic experimentation. Somewhere you can also hear one man sitting with just a Jupiter 8 until the early hours of the morning, coming up with the sort of ideas which can fuse music, electronics and computing into an album as imaginative as XL-1.