my power pop addiction, no. 85 (157)

When it comes to the Holy Trinity of British punk - The Buzzcocks, Wire and the Sex Pistols - the Buzzcocks are by far my favorite. The Sex Pistols are ‘important’ in a cultural and historical sense, but they have way too much contempt for their audience for my taste and their music is too hard and heavy for my fey listening habits these days. Wire have a handful of transcendent moments, especially on their spectacular debut album, Pink Flag, but thereafter they become progressively more arty with each record and the ‘songs’, such as they are, are often too atonal to really penetrate into the part of my brain that registers aural pleasure. This leaves the Buzzcocks, who straddle the fine line separating punk and New Wave. I think it'd be fair to say that they're pop life punks. I love their neurotic lyrics and the way the irreverence is tempered by moments of genuine frailty and even sensitivity. It's the kind of human touch that's completely alien to most punk rock of the period. Singles Going Steady was a big record for me when I was a teenager, each song so wonderfully guitar spangled and perfectly balanced between melody and alienation. Listening to those songs again now, I'm still so taken by the band's command of tight, hooky songcraft. I also admire their throwback neo-Mod style, which gives them some continuity with a broader tradition of English pop greatness. …For some reason, tonight’s song is rarely if ever mentioned as one of the all-time power pop greats, perhaps because punk is typically viewed as distinct from power pop. But we strive here at the Lonely One to expand categories instead of limiting them, and any song as catchy as Ever Fallen in Love, with its gloriously melodic chorus and spot-on rendering of raw romantic anguish, absolutely deserves to be in the conversation…