Sunday Synthpop Brunch: Pete Shelley

Following the abrupt dissolution of The Buzzcocks in 1981, songwriter/guitarist/lead singer Pete Shelley set to work crafting a solo album called Homosapien from a batch of songs initially intended for the band's next album.

Working again with frequent Buzzcocks producer Martin Rushent (who was then coming off of a worldwide smash hit with the Human League's Dare), Shelley's work would retain the pop sensibilities of his old band but with a drastically different production ethic: as was the case with many then-modern synth albums from the likes of the League, Steve Winwood, and F.R. David, Homosapien was a weirdly stripped-down sounding work -- many of the tracks having a sparse, almost demo-like quality due to a near-total reliance on synthesizers and drum machines with hardly any human accoutrements of any kind to flesh out the sonic picture.

Stylistically, Shelley seemed to bounce all over the map on Homosapien, deploying ridiculously twee dance-pop confections like "Qu'est-Ce Que C'est Que Ca?" alongside more funk-derived rhythmic pieces like "Witness The Change." Alongside these period-pieces, if you will, was the more immediately striking (and catchy) title track, a relentless, stomping dance number possessed of a weirdly dense and unforgiving production sound for it's time (and almost certainly an influence on the music of a young Trent Reznor years later: listen to the nasally vocals and the way the synths seem to snarl malevolently in the mix). The same was true of "Telephone Operator" from the following year's EP XL-1, which was noticeably harder-edged and "bigger" in sound, with some caustic guitar textures buried beneath the synths that give this already-menacing single a real kick in the ass.

While Homosapien is what gave Shelley's career a spark in the States (thanks to MTV, the album actually surfed the bottom half of the Billboard Top 200 album chart over the summer of 1982), XL-1 is what finally attracted a smattering of attention back home in the U.K. as "Telephone Operator" blipped and and off the Top 75 in the spring of 1983, followed by the EP's monthlong residency in the lower reaches of the Top 50 over the summertime. Sadly, what little momentum Shelley managed to build up at home and in America by the middle of 1983 was quickly lost, perhaps largely due to inactivity: it would be another three full years before he returned again with the comparatively lackluster Heaven & The Sea ... and by that time, the world had ceased to care.