Buzzcocks – "Harmony in My Head" (1979)

And life’s little ironies

Seem so obvious now

(Yes, life’s little ironies do seem obvious now.  But they weren’t obvious back then – and that was when they mattered.)

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Howard Devoto (né Howard Trafford) and the late Pete Shelley (né Peter McNeish) co-founded the Buzzcocks when both were university students in 1976.

Devoto left the band before its first album was released in 1978 and formed Magazine.  Last week, 2 or 3 lines featured the Magazine song “Shot by Both Sides.”

Steve Diggle and Pete Shelley in 1978

Today’s featured song was released by the Buzzcocks as a non-album single in 1979.  It was written and sung by the band’s original bassist, Steve Diggle.  

I heard both songs on Steven Lorber’s “Mystic Eyes” radio show in 1980.  (We’ll be featuring more “Mystic Eyes” records in March, after we present this year’s “29 Posts in 29 Days.”)

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Diggle was introduced to Devoto and Shelley at a Sex Pistols show by that group’s manager, Malcolm McLaren.

“Malcolm McLaren came in with this guy and said, ‘Here’s your new bass player,’ and it was Steve, who was waiting to meet someone completely different,” Shelley told an interviewer in 2006. “By the time we'd realized the comedy of errors it was too late, so he stayed and watched the gig. The next day, we had a rehearsal . . . and within six weeks of actually meeting Steve, we were doing the first Buzzcocks gig.”

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I saw the Buzzcocks perform in 2014 at the Black Cat in Washington, DC.  (“Harmony in My Head” was their first encore that night.)

Diggle and Shelley in 2012

Click here to read a detailed description of that show.

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Click here to watch a video of the Buzzcocks performing “Harmony in My Head” – which eventually made it to #32 on the British single charts – on the legendary British television show, Top of the Pops.  

Click on the link below to buy the song from Amazon: